


Malleus Maleficarum

by perphesone



Category: Star Trek, Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies), Star Trek: The Original Series
Genre: Alcohol, Alien Abduction, Alien Biology, Alien Technology Mistaken for Magic, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - 1970s, Alternate Universe - Historical, Background Relationships, Bittersweet Ending, Crash Landing, Explicit Language, Falling In Love, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Lust at First Sight, M/M, Mystery, Paranormal Investigators, Past Relationship(s)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-09-19
Updated: 2017-10-09
Packaged: 2018-08-10 13:16:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 27,693
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7846546
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/perphesone/pseuds/perphesone
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the summer of 1976, a man with pointed ears moved into the old abandoned Grayson house up on the hill just north of town. Right around the same time, strange things started happening in Riverside—even stranger than when Amanda Grayson mysteriously disappeared back in 1948. Jimmy Kirk has always wanted to know the truth. Leonard McCoy just wants to make it through the summer alive.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Genus Superstition

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “Here it must be noticed that there are fourteen distinct species which come under **the genus superstition** , but these for the sake of brevity it is hardly necessary to detail.”  
> - _Malleus Maleficarum_ of Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger, 1487

It started with the fish.

It was the first full week of July that year when folks noticed that the reason those catfish and carpsuckers that they’d been having so much trouble catching weren’t taking any bait was because they were busy washing up dead on the banks of the English River on the south edge of town. A few guys from the fish and wildlife service had come out to check for contaminants in the water and every test they’d run had come back negative, but they put out an advisory against eating anything caught in the area all the same.

It was right around then that Chrissy Chapel woke up one morning on the side of the dirt road that led out of town to the Kirks’ farmhouse to find all her cash and jewelry and her diamond engagement ring missing, with no idea how she got there and no memory of being assaulted. Winona Kirk had found her and given her a ride to the police station on her way into town, where Officer Komack told her she was lucky the crook had only taken her valuables and maybe she shouldn’t drink so much next time she went out. Never mind that the last thing Chrissy remembered was being alone in her own house, sober.

Most of her jewelry was already laid out on the counter at Mudd’s Jewelry and Pawn when Monty Scott went in ahead of the owner to open the store at around 8:30 that same morning. There was no evidence of a break-in, much less any indication of how the trespasser had gotten into the cash box to take out the $150 that was missing. Scotty figured he’d make up the losses elsewhere when Chrissy’s boyfriend Roger came in to pawn his guitar and recognized one of her necklaces, accusing Scotty of robbing her—as though he’d be stupid enough to steal someone’s jewelry and put it up for sale in a town with a population just shy of 800. So he fudged the numbers on a few other transactions to keep Mr. Mudd out of the loop and gave Chrissy back her earrings, pendant, and bracelets, but there was no sign of her engagement ring turning up at the pawn shop or anywhere else.

At the end of that same week, Jim Kirk decided to swing by Happy Petals to pick up some flowers to give to his ma for her birthday. Just as he finished putting his Chevy in park, he saw a man who he had never seen before on his way out of the shop, wearing a crisp white linen jumpsuit, what looked like leather gardening gloves and a wide-brimmed straw sun hat pulled all the way down on his head to rest right on top of his dark glasses. He was carrying a paper bag stuffed with cut flowers in one hand and had a potted fern tucked up against his chest in his other arm. Jim could hardly see his face, just the end of a nose and a sharp, pale jawline obscured by shade from the hat, but that funky suit was pretty snug around his hips, which meant Jim got a good look at one phenomenal ass as the stranger set off walking down the road.

“Hey, man,” Jim said as he pushed the glass door open, followed by the sound of a jingling bell, “did you see that guy who was just in here?” he asked, trying to sound casually interested instead of totally infatuated and failing.

“Hey, good morning to you, too, Jimmy,” the shopkeeper—Hikaru Sulu, who would probably take over the store soon and pretty much ran it already since the owner was always up in Iowa City these days, seeing to their newly opened second location—greeted him from the far window, which he was cleaning with a rag. The pots that usually sat up displayed on the sill were set down around his feet. “And no, I was just in the back. Who was in here, Leila?”

Jim turned to see the pretty blonde woman leaning towards them over the counter with the register. “Oh, hey, baby, I didn’t know you’d be in here today,” he said with a smile as he crossed over to give her a one-armed hug and a kiss on the cheek.

“Yeah right, Jim. I’m here every Saturday since the beginning of the summer and you know it,” she said, rolling her eyes at him, but not before she gave him a kiss in return. “Anyways, it was the same creep who came in last week, Hikaru. I just sold more than fifty dollars of flowers to him this time. It was unreal. He wanted to know all their Latin names and I had to call up the library and ask them to look them up for me. He talks weird, too, like he learned English from old books or something, but he doesn’t really have an accent or anything and his voice is pretty dreamy. He’s totally freaky, but he’s also kind of a fox, you know?”

“Yeah,” Jim said, “I did _see_ him walking out, after all. Does he ever take off those shades?”

She shook her head. “Mm-m. He wears this big straw hat all the time, too. I think he must be from some big city or something, and it’s, you know, a fashion statement. Maybe Chicago? Or New York. He might even be from out west.”

“You don’t know?”

“Nobody knows. I’ve been asking around all week and hardly anyone has seen him around, and nobody who’s seen him knows who he is. I mean, I don’t even know his name.”

“What the hell is he doing in Riverside of all places if he doesn’t know anyone?”

“Beats me,” Leila said, picking up the crochet purse she’d set on the floor by her feet and fishing out a pack of cigarettes and  a lighter. “You want one, Jimmy?”

“Sure, baby, thanks.” He took a cigarette and let her light it for him.

“Anyhow,” she said after taking her first drag, “Marly Moreau said she saw him going into the old Grayson house at the top of the hill the other day.”

“What was Marly doing around the old Grayson house?” Hikaru asked, now setting the potted plants back up in front of the window he’d just cleaned. “Hasn’t it been empty for twenty years?”

“Twenty-five,” Jim said. “Amanda Grayson disappeared in forty-eight and the rest of the family packed up and moved out west three years later.”

“Disappeared?” Leila asked. “I always thought she was murdered.”

“No one knows for sure. They never found a body.”

“Well, yeah, ‘cause she was, you know, a Satanic sacrifice or something. They probably _ate_ the fucking body.”

“Jesus christ, Leila, don’t talk about shit like that in front of the seedlings,” Hikaru admonished jokingly. “You’re gonna freak them out and stunt their growth and then we’ll be out of business.” Finished setting up the plants, he turned around and frowned when he saw them, putting his hands on his hips—which looked _nice_ and slim in those new (or at least, Jim hadn’t seen him in them before) flared jeans that he had his yellow short-sleeved shirt tucked into. “Come on, you two, put those out. How many times do I have to tell you, Leila? Smoke seriously _is_ bad for the plants. Just go outside and take a break if you want one.”

Leila rolled her eyes, but obediently snuffed her cigarette out on the counter, which looked like a _lot_ of lights had been put out on it already. Jim followed her lead.

“So anyhow, like I was saying,” Leila went on, with Jim and Hikaru’s full attention, “Marly saw him going into the abandoned house, and once he got in there she kind of hung around for a while, and she says she saw these freaky colorful lights coming from the windows after a minute. And, y’know, that house has been empty for so long I didn’t think it would even have electricity hooked up, so I asked Roger Korby over at the electric company and he said yeah, no one had been over to evaluate the wiring or anything, and as far as he knows, no one has officially moved in, either.”

“That’s so creepy,” Hikaru said. “What do you think he’s up to?”

“God only knows,” Leila said, shaking her head. “Anyhow, Jim, you didn’t come in here just to shoot the shit, did you?”

“Oh, right, yeah—today’s my ma’s birthday so I thought I’d get her a bouquet or something.”

“Sure, baby,” she replied, slinking out from behind the counter—she was showing a whole lot of leg today, Jim noticed appreciatively—and over to the rack of cut flowers. “You want roses?”

“Sure.”

“How about these yellow ones, and some big white daisies? Does your mom like yellow?”

“I guess she does.”

“Well, she’ll like these,” Leila assured him, grabbing some smaller sprigs of flowers along with the roses and daisies to fill out the bouquet and taking it to the counter to trim the stems and wrap them in tissue paper. “Here, Jimmy,” she said as she tied a light blue ribbon neatly around the bundle of flowers, “that costs six-fifty.”

“Thanks, Leila.” He gave her a five, two ones, and a kiss on the cheek. “See you around, Hikaru!”

“Seeya.”

“Bye, Jim!”

 

***

 

“Come on, Bones, please, just do this with me,” Jim was begging later that night, sprawled out across the cream-colored carpet in Leonard McCoy’s living room—he’d moved up to one of the mobile home parks on the outside of Iowa City with his girlfriend Jocelyn after he graduated from Iowa State, just as an in-between kind of place to live until Bones got through medical school and landed a residency. But then they had Joanna last June, and then they had the wedding, and of course Jocelyn had to quit her job at the bank to take care of the baby, and then Bones couldn’t swing tuition anymore and had to withdraw, and with all of that…well, it looked like they’d be stuck in-between for at least a few more years.

“I don’t see why I should,” Bones replied, coming in from the tiny kitchen enclave with an opened bottle of beer for each of them.

“Well, it’s Saturday, you know, so you don’t have to go into work tomorrow.” Jim sat up, leaning back against the front of the compact sofa, and took the bottle Bones held out to him. “Thanks, baby,” he said, and then he tipped his head back and took a sizeable swig.

“So—,” Bones said as he lowered himself onto one half of the couch, “let me just think this over out loud for a minute, so you can hear how crazy you sound—so you think that I am gonna give up my one peaceful night having the house to myself and no work in the morning—and keep in mind Joss won’t be home with Joanna until tomorrow _night,_ which means I am a _free man_ for almost twenty-four hours starting now—and you want me to give that up so that I can drive around with you in the middle of the night staking out an old abandoned house for absolutely no goddamn reason?”

“It is not for no goddamn reason, Bones!” Jim whined. “Besides, it’s not abandoned anymore. I told you about those freaky lights, didn’t I?”

“Yeah, and you told me about that _stone fox_ you saw walking out of Happy Petals, too. I know you, kid,” Bones said, starting in on his own beer—his fourth of the night.

“No, man, come on. It’s not about that, it’s about Amanda Grayson.”

“Oh, it is?”

“Nobody ever found out what happened to her, you know, even after the FBI got involved.”

“So?”

 _“So,_ nobody knows what happened for sure, but right around the night that she disappeared a couple folks reported colored lights coming out from her bedroom window. Just like what Marlena saw up at the house last week.”

Bones looked at him skeptically. “How would you know that?”

“Because, after my dad died, Sheriff Pike took pity on me and tried to take me under his wing, so one afternoon when I was fifteen he drove me down to the county sheriff’s office in Washington to watch him work and when he wasn’t looking I found some of the case files and witness statements surrounding Amanda Grayson’s disappearance.”

“Do I want to know why?”

Jim shrugged. “It wasn’t the only file I looked at. I was interested in all the unsolved cases, but…Amanda was friends with my ma, before it happened, so I always heard stories about her when I was growing up. I even saw some pictures.”

He took a drink, and then a deep breath.

“Anyhow, the point is that there’s a connection between the case from 1948 and what’s been going on at the Grayson house now, and whatever—or _who_ ever—caused those lights that Marlena saw is the common factor.”

“Alright.”

“Bones!” Jim climbed up onto the couch to sit on his knees, facing Bones and looking him dead in the eye. “Don’t you get it, man? It could be happening again! This could be the perpetrator, coming back to repeat the same crime over again, only now the house is empty so it could be anyone—hell, it could be _Marlena_ if she keeps hanging around there.”

During his speech, Jim had unconsciously leaned in and set his hands firmly on Bones’s shoulders.

“So,” Bones said carefully, “why don’t you just go on down to the county office and tell Sheriff Pike? It’s his case.”

“‘Cause, you know, I don’t have any solid evidence yet. Besides, he wouldn’t believe it—Amanda Grayson disappeared in nineteen forty-eight, and the case file calls it a murder. Twenty-eight years later, even if he was around twenty at the time, he wouldn’t look like the guy I saw today, and more likely he was older back then and he’d be an old man by now.”

“An old man, not a _tall drink of water,"_ Bones said dryly.

“Well, _yeah,_ exactly!" Jim said, not letting the teasing slow his momentum. "So, y’know, Pike isn’t going to believe me and neither is any other cop, because they think it was an ordinary murder and, more importantly, they’re assuming the killer was an ordinary man.”

Bones furrowed his eyebrows in confusion, looking at him blankly. “You’ve lost me, Jim. Are you saying the killer was a woman?”

“No, it was him. It was definitely him. It was that freak from the florist, for sure. Think about it, man: he kills a young woman here, in this town, almost thirty years ago, and now that the case has been closed for years he comes back to the same house, looking just as young as ever—well, I didn’t really see his face, but he had the _ass_ of a man still in his prime, that’s for sure. Look, you’ve heard those rumors that Amanda Grayson was a sacrifice to a Satanic cult, right? Well, I don’t know if the devil was involved or not but I don’t think that’s far from the truth. I think this guy kills in order to, uh, sustain himself, to keep himself young, y’know, to absorb their life energy so that he doesn’t have to age or die. I don’t know if he’s a vampire, or a Satanic worshipper, or if he’s doing some kind of witchcraft, or what, but I know he’s dangerous and the cops don’t know how to deal with this kind of thing so that means it’s up to us, Bones.”

“...Jimmy—”

“Please, Bones, please, I know how it sounds, but just come with me tonight. If nothing happens, if we don’t see anything then we can forget about the whole stupid thing, but this is our _home,_ you know?”

“Jimmy, _we_ don’t know how to deal with this kind of thing—”

“I have to know. A woman disappeared from that house and nobody knows how or why. I have to make sure nobody’s in danger. Please.”

Bones looked at him for a long moment.

“I’ll stake out the house with you if I can spend the night at your place tonight,” he said. He shifted uncomfortably on the sofa, squirming under Jim’s gaze. “You know I don’t like being in a house alone by myself all night,” he said quietly, as though someone listening in at the window might overhear and think less of him.

Jim’s mouth fell open and then stretched into a wide grin. “Thank you, Bones, thank you so much, baby, of course you can come back with me tonight, thank you.”

Maybe it was the booze, or maybe it was just old habit, but he leaned in and pressed a grateful kiss to his friend’s lips, wrapping his arms around his shoulders and letting out a hum of pleasure from deep in his throat.

Bones stiffened but didn’t yank away from Jim’s embrace like he might have if he hadn’t had the excuse of being liquored up himself. He just sat immobile and watched Jim’s face sadly when he retreated back to his own side of the couch.

“Jesus christ, Jimmy,” he said with an exasperated sigh, “we’re not in high school anymore.”

Jim averted his eyes from Bones, and they were drawn—of _course_ —to one of Joanna’s brightly colored toys that had been strewn across the floor, a little red wooden car with wheels. Jim loved when he got to spend time with Joanna. She was already a year old, real pretty, with big brown eyes and blonde hair that was just starting to grow in darker, and she loved hitting the keys on her little toy xylophone when Jim was watching her and her daddy was trying to take a nap on the couch—a girl after Jim’s own heart. Jim bit the inside of his cheek. “Sorry, man. I know. It won’t happen again, alright?”

“Alright.”

“Alright! Right on!” Jim exclaimed, switching gears and jumping up off of the couch spontaneously. “Let’s boogie, Bones! We’ve got an _investigation_ to run!” he said exuberantly, clapping his hands together for emphasis.

Bones stood up after him, shaking his head and smiling fondly despite himself, and went to the fridge first to get another six-pack to last them through the stakeout. Jim was already over by the door, pulling on his boots.


	2. I Feel the Earth Move

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “Oh, darling, when you're near me  
> And you tenderly call my name  
> I know that my emotions  
> Are something that I just can't tame  
> I've just got to have you, baby”  
> - **I Feel the Earth Move** , Carole King, 1971

 

 

Jim woke up with a start in the driver's seat of his white Chevy, coated in a film of sticky half-dried sweat and suffering from a murderous headache. He felt tired and gross.

“Oh, god fucking damn it,” he swore under his breath as he registered the passage of time, squinting against the low summer morning sunlight and holding up a hand to shield his eyes. He looked over and saw Bones still unconscious, slumped over in the passenger seat. Trying to loosen up his stiff muscles, Jim straightened out his legs and arms as far as he could in the confined space. His right foot knocked into an empty bottle and he groaned as he bent down to fish it out and felt around the floorboards and under the seat to make sure there weren’t any more floating around down there that could get lodged underneath the pedals while he was driving.

They had pulled up to the bottom of the driveway of the old Grayson house the night before and sat there with the headlights off, drinking beer and shooting the breeze and watching for any freaky lights or any signs of the black arts or any other suspicious behavior. From the time they parked there until the time they’d fallen asleep, they had watched the stranger sitting immobile, silhouetted against a faint bluish glow in one upstairs window. He might as well have been a statue, not so much as getting up to piss for as long as Jim was wakeful and watching—hours, he was sure, even if he didn’t know exactly when sleep had taken him. Either the man slept sitting up or he had some kind of mind-blowing self control.

He salvaged three empty bottles and tossed them onto the backseat, where they landed with deadened, hollow thumps on the leather upholstery, and when he lifted his head up again the sunlight that had been pouring in through the driver’s side window was blocked out by a tall shadow in a yellow straw sunhat.

Jim’s jaw dropped.

Standing there facing the car, the stranger’s figure was well-defined by light spilling around him from the sun rising behind his head. He was wearing another jumpsuit with the same cut as the one from the day before, this time rust brown with long sleeves that clung desperately to his sculpted biceps and widened around his wrists. This close, Jim could see that the fabric was textured, with a coarse weave like burlap. Jim drunk in the view of it stretched taut around those muscular thighs and straight hips and let his eyes drift up to the tapered waistline, cinched in and defined by a wide wine-colored leather belt. Above the belt, the torso of the suit was looser, because the line of buttons running down the center had only been done up barely halfway, so the front fell open and revealed a long slice of pale skin, covered with a thatch of dark hair. Nestled in that delicious sliver of exposed chest was a pendant, some kind of deep blue rock strung on a black cord. Something about the way it shone in the morning sun made it look otherworldly. Mystical. Jim took the uneasy feeling it gave him as positive evidence of witchcraft.

Jim finally tore his eyes away from that chest, over those ivory collarbones, along a throat where he could see the barest traces of dark stubble underneath a clean-shaven jaw and up to the face of the stranger. When he met the dark, coffee-black eyes peering at him from under the shade of that straw hat, he snapped out of his trance. In one frantic motion, he started turning the window crank with one hand and reached up to wipe an unfortunate line of drool away from his mouth with the other.

“Hey, man,” he said dumbly once the window was rolled all the way down.

“State your purpose,” the stranger said, and Leila was serious when she said that voice was dreamy. It was deep and smooth, and listening to it was like lying back on red satin sheets and getting comfortably drunk on bourbon whiskey.

“I, uh, fell asleep,” he said, mind still clouded from a night of poor sleep cut short and a little dazed by the appearance of this gorgeous creature in front of him.

“Evidently. Why are you  here?”

“I’m—I’m gonna get out of the car, okay? Just step back a little.”

The stranger acquiesced, granting Jim a wide enough berth to open the car door and step out. He cast a glance over his shoulder at Bones to confirm he was still asleep before closing the door behind him and leaning up against it.

Even once he was standing up nearly straight, the stranger cut an imposing figure, an inch or two taller than Jim was and just as broad. Jim would admit to being a little intimidated, but if his knees were failing him then it was just because this guy was so sexy it was unreal, especially now that Jim could see his face. He had a sharply defined jawline and high, hollow cheekbones and deep, glittering eyes that made Jim think of a star chart or the Iowa River at midnight. His dark brows were shaped strangely, angled up sharply at the ends in a way nobody’s eyebrows naturally grew, and even that was somehow flattering on him.

“You’re, uh, new in town, aren’t you? I’m Jim Kirk,” he said, sticking his hand out with inadvisable confidence for the stranger to shake.

The stranger’s eyes widened, staring uncomprehendingly at Jim’s outstretched hand.

“I am Spock,” he said finally, not moving.

“Spock! Okay, Spock, it’s cool to meet you, man,” Jim said, reaching out and taking Spock’s limp hand anyways, shaking it once and letting it go, whereupon it fell directly back to its position at his side. His hands were bare, unlike the last time Jim had seen him, and his skin felt dry, soft, and very hot.

“Why are you here?” Spock repeated, clasping his hands behind his back.

“Where are you from, Spock?” Jim countered. “What is that name, is it, um, Polish? Ukrainian?”

Spock narrowed his eyes at Jim. “Yes,” he said after a moment of deliberation.

“So you’re from the Soviet Union.”

“My mother was born in Iowa.”

“Well,” Jim said, turning his head to look in both directions, “I don’t see your mother around here anywhere, so what about you, baby?” He wasn’t getting anywhere, so he might as well have some fun.

“I was not born in Iowa.”

So much for having fun. Jim filed that response away and smiled blithely. He pointed, indicating Spock’s sunhat. “That’s a, uh, pretty groovy hat you got there. Can I try it on?”

“...You may not,” said Spock, looking mystified.

Jim pushed himself up off the side of the car and stepped towards Spock.

Spock retreated away from him at the same time, stiffly maintaining the distance between them.

“Is your automobile functioning acceptably?”

Jim instinctively turned to inspect the car for signs of external damage. “Uh, as far as I know, yeah.”

“If that is the case, you will leave this property immediately.”

A playful grin teased at Jim’s mouth and he bit his lower lip. “Will I?”

“You will not come here again.”

“Okay, baby, if you say so.”

“Do not come here again,” Spock repeated gravely.

Jim held up his hands in surrender. “Alright, man,” he said, taking a step backwards towards the car. “See you around,” he offered feebly as he opened the door and climbed into the driver’s seat, not taking his eyes off of Spock, standing there like an installation piece in a gallery, completely still, until he was backing out of the end of the gravel driveway and he had to check his mirrors to pull onto the road.

It was a testament to how _hard_ Bones worked every goddamn day of his life that he barely stirred the whole time, softly snoring in the passenger seat all the way home until Jim shook him awake in front of his single-wide and let him out of the car. Jim stepped out too and pulled him—still groggy from sleep, so he didn’t bother grumbling to keep up the flimsy pretense of machismo—into a fiercely affectionate hug, close and tight and warm, before seeing him off.

Bones was a real good friend.

 

***

 

Admittedly, the operation last night had been impulsive and ill-advised, and Jim knew he couldn’t risk catching Spock’s attention like that again—even if he had gained some valuable information from their encounter. Namely, that Spock was not only a generally shady character and a probable occultist freak but also an embarrassingly bad liar. He couldn’t get that close again, at least not in the car, and he needed to be able to record any other conversations they had in case there _did_ come a time that Jim would need to notify the sheriff of real criminal activity.

And, yeah, it would be a smart thing not to be quite as drunk next time.

So he pulled up to Mudd’s Jewelry and Pawn at around 5:30 that evening after taking care of some things around the farmhouse, fingers crossed that it would be Scotty running the place and not the old man.

“Hey, Jim, what’s happenin’?”

Thankfully, it was Scotty who looked up from whatever half-taken-apart electronics he was tinkering with on the counter and greeted him when he walked into the store. Harry Mudd was nowhere to be seen, as usual.

“Hi, Scotty, baby,” Jim said with a grin, slapping Scotty’s outstretched hand. “I just need a couple things; do you have any binoculars in stock?”

“I think so. Like for bird watching?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“Just look around; I’ll see if I can find ‘em, too.”

Jim nodded and turned out to scan the racks and shelves lining the inside of the store. The rack of guitars caught his eye, and he noticed with amusement that Roger’s old acoustic Ibanez was up on the wall again. Maybe he was trying to buy Chrissy a replacement for her missing ring. Most of the instruments were like that—beat-up acoustic guitars that circulated in and out of Mudd’s inventory depending on how much cash their owners needed to pay for the booze, or the drugs, or in this case the diamond jewelry that they wanted—but one of them, stuck up in between a Gibson and a Fender as though it belonged there, was definitely not a guitar. Or any other instrument Jim had seen before in his life, for that matter. It looked like it had around twenty strings pulled taut between a big circular knob mounted on the vaguely triangular wooden body and a long, gently curved neck that extended diagonally to the right from the top left corner of the body.

“Hey, Scotty, what’s that?”

Scotty looked where he was pointing and a thoughtful expression crossed his face. “You know, I’m not sure. I think it’s a balalaika. I just got it earlier today so I haven’t looked into it yet, but the cat who brought it in told me it was from the Soviet Union. Ukrainian, I think he said.”

Jim narrowed his eyes suspiciously at the instrument. “Who brought it in? Was it, uh,” Jim gestured vaguely, “rumbly voice, straw hat, tight jumpsuit?”

“Yeah, that sounds like the guy,” Scotty confirmed. “He came in at around eleven this morning and traded it in for a bicycle. He seemed kinda queer, if I’m being honest. Do you know him?”

“Can I buy it?” Jim asked, ignoring Scotty’s question.

“...Sure, Jim. Do you still want the binoculars?” Scotty asked, holding up a pair he’d managed to find.

“Yeah, and I also need a portable cassette recorder if you have one.”

“Sure. Are you recording a demo tape? I didn’t know you were into playing music.”

“Yeah, something like that. Thanks, Scotty.”

 

***

 

Jim went back to the old Grayson house at around eleven o’clock that same night, alone this time. He parked his car on the side of the road at the base of the hill and went up to the house on foot, grabbing his new tools of the trade from where he’d set them on the floor of the passenger side and taking care to walk on the overgrown grass lining the drive instead of the gravel driveway itself. He’d gone back home first and changed into dark-colored clothes: dark jeans and a ribbed knit black turtleneck, despite the lingering heat left over from earlier in the day. He was as close to silent as he could get—and that was pretty damn near. Tonight, he was getting down to business.

Approaching the house, he noticed a light on in one of the second-story rooms, shining out through two half-open windows. Unlike the weird dim blue glow from the night before, this looked like a regular incandescent fixture. He scanned the yard for a vantage point and his eyes landed on an old, sturdy tree that he thought he could climb where he’d have an unobstructed view in through the windows. He secured the binoculars’ strap around his neck and, after weighing the pros and cons of either trying to climb with one arm or carrying the tape recorder in his pocket where it could fall out and shatter, decided to leave it on the ground for now. He worked more slowly than he would have otherwise for the sake of stealth, but he was up in the tree in minutes, hanging on to the trunk and nestling himself into the bend at the base of a wide branch. He put his weight on the branch gradually, releasing a tense breath and settling in when it held.

Just like he thought, he had a perfect view of both windows.

So he held up the binoculars, quickly adjusted the focus, and looked on in.

At first glance, there wasn’t much to see.

The room looked like it had been some kind of study back when the house was occupied legitimately. There were bookshelves lining the walls, with nothing on them seeming overtly out of the ordinary. There was a chair in front of a desk on the far side of the room with two neat stacks of notebooks and papers pushed to one corner and some unidentifiable rocks—predictably, Jim thought, given the blue crystal talisman Spock had been wearing around his neck—and some fine tools or implements of some kind laid out across the rest of the mahogany surface. Right in front of the left hand window was a small, round table, also mahogany by the looks of it, and that was where Spock had set some of the flowers he’d bought from Happy Petals the day before—lying flat in their tissue paper wrappers, not set up in a vase. There was a worn red and brown oriental rug covering the middle of the floor. At one end of the rug was… yeah, that was a crystal chandelier lying there, partially dismantled. Had Spock taken it down from another room in the house so he could harvest the crystals to focus some sort of energy? Was that part of the ritual he was planning?

Jim’s eyes were drawn to motion on the other side of the room.

He drew in a sharp breath.

It was Spock, walking into the room, still wearing that rust-colored jumpsuit but barefoot and hatless, carrying what looked like a thin black sheet folded a few times and draped over one arm.

Jim could see his whole face for the first time, his hair, the tops of his ears, and they were…

He lowered the binoculars in confusion and blinked several times to clear his vision, then looked again to confirm what he thought he’d seen. No, his eyes weren’t playing tricks on him. Watching Spock’s face in profile, he could plainly see that those pale ears, starkly outlined against his glossy black hair, tapered up to a sharp, curved point—like a picture of the devil himself.

Holy shit.

Holy fucking shit god damn oh no.

This was real.

He was some kind of vampire, or a demon or an incubus, or something.

Jim’s stomach suddenly felt like it was full of cold molten lead.

He kept watching.

Spock stopped at the desk and set the bundle of fabric on the seat of the chair, and then, oh christ, he started to undo the buttons down the center of his jumpsuit. He was baring much more of his skin than Jim had seen that morning, but Jim’s eyes were glued to his long, smoothly working fingers and the graceful bones in his wrists. Jim was transfixed as Spock let that rust-red fabric fall away from his arms and chest like the remnants of a papery cocoon that hung loosely over his hips, suspended there by the wide belt that remained fastened at his waist. His build was solid, his core a column of powerful-looking muscles without much extra flesh. The dark hair that covered his chest tapered into a trail that ran enticingly down the center line of his stomach and disappeared behind that leather belt.

Jim felt sick with how much he wanted to bury his face in that hair, to feel if it was coarse or soft and draw patterns in it with his tongue. He felt disgusting for how bad he wanted it, how bad he wanted to be underneath that sick devil-worshipping suspected murderer with freaky eyebrows and pointy ears, tasting the sweat dripping down from the hollow at the base of his throat. Spock drew in a particularly deep breath and stretched his arms lithely over his head, hands clasped together. Jim’s center of gravity shifted forward as Spock’s ribcage expanded. Jim breathed out when Spock breathed out. He swallowed painfully.

He kept watching.

Spock turned away from him—mercifully, Jim thought, until he saw Spock pull his belt off and hang it over the back of the chair in one swift, efficient motion. The jumpsuit immediately slid down off of his hips, revealing tight briefs hugging close to an even tighter ass. He stepped neatly out of the pant legs and folded the jumpsuit up, leaving it on the chair with the belt.

Watching as Spock’s hands found his waistband and he slipped off his briefs, Jim was sure that he was an incubus. He had made a bargain with the devil and devoted himself to the black arts to be this irresistibly sexy, or else there was no explaining it.

Jim heard himself whimper faintly as Spock bent over, showing off every contour of his ass and his thick, muscular thighs, covered in dark hair, albeit more sparsely than his chest. He picked up the black bundle from the seat of the chair and shook it open at arms’ length. It was only after Spock had draped it around himself and was securing a tie at the waist that Jim realized it was a robe. It was loose and opaque and the hemline dragged on the floor, but despite all the extra fabric it clung to his form like wet silk. Spock glided, suddenly elegant, almost spectre-like, to put away his clothes from the day somewhere that Jim couldn’t see through the window.

Spock drifted back to the desk, sitting and taking a notebook from the top of the stack and _thank christ,_ now Jim would have something to look at besides his unfairly beautiful suspect. Said suspect opened the notebook to a clean page and produced a pen from the front drawer of the desk. He began to write.

It wasn’t in English, but Jim had almost expected that.

But it wasn’t in Latin, either, and he would bet his life that it wasn’t _Ukrainian._

The script ran from top to bottom like Japanese calligraphy, but the characters flowed into and twisted around one another mysteriously, forming wandering loops and spirals that before long were filling up the page.

Spock’s hand moved with precision—the runic symbols were incomprehensible, but Jim could see how the top and bottom margins and the spaces between each line remained consistent as long as Spock kept writing. Whatever it was, this was a language that he was well-practiced in. Jim wondered how old Spock was and imagined him sitting straight-backed at a writing desk in a stone castle or a university tower in the sixteenth century, in the Old World, lit by the flickering light of a steadily melting candle, the same intricate script flowing out of his feather quill until the candle burned down or the sun began to rise.

He pictured Spock as Jack the Ripper, skulking hungrily in an alleyway in London, waiting for his unsuspecting sacrificial bride for the night.

He saw Spock lying across a slab of stone, a pagan altar in the center of Stonehenge, stripped bare and consumed by the heady fragrance of ceremonial smoke rising through the air, waiting to become a sacrificial bride himself.

He thought of Spock in the midst of the Salem witch trials, dressed in the high-collared clothes of a Puritan clergyman, hiding his face under a hooded cloak and sentencing the fellow witches who threatened to expose his nature to be burned or stoned to death with a wave of his pale, long-fingered hand.

He thought of Amanda Grayson crying, begging for her life before being murdered in cold blood, destroyed in a flash of colored light, never to be seen again, without even a body left behind for burial, and he felt bile rising up to claw at the inside of his throat.

Spock fell still.

Jim stopped breathing.

Spock rose from his seat and when he turned around to face the window his eyes found Jim’s in an instant.

Jim was caught in his arresting glare, unable to move, unable to think and then without warning his entire body was screaming at him to _leave leave leave go away do not come here again you do not belong here go_ **_home_** _, Jim Kirk,_ **_go home and leave here._ **

Jim didn’t remember climbing down the tree, or picking up the tape recorder, or getting into his Chevy or driving home, but suddenly he was in his own bedroom, halfway done stripping off his jeans, shivering and drenched in sweat but not feeling any trace of fear.

He got undressed and into bed and fell asleep without bothering to shower, or even to clean himself up after he stroked himself to orgasm right there on top of the blankets, feeling hollow and tired and hotly ashamed of his lust.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> little note: it's probably clear from the dialogue, but I'm not writing characters like Scotty and Chekov with their canon accents. they're just american. it seemed weird for such a teeny tiny town with such homogeneous demographics (in real life) to have any significant population of first-generation immigrants. so if some words/expressions bother you because of that, I won't be offended if you edit their dialogue and read it with an accent in your head as you go through the story :)


	3. The Power of the Devil

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “Moreover, it is useless to argue that any result of witchcraft may be a phantasy and unreal, because such a phantasy cannot be procured without resort to **the power of the devil** , and it is necessary that there should be made a contract with the devil. [...] For this indeed is the end of all witchcraft; whether it be the casting of spells by a look or by a formula of words or by some other charm, it is all of the devil, as will be made clear.”
> 
> - _Malleus Maleficarum_ of Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger, 1487

 

“You know, Roger got into a fight this morning,” Chrissy told Jim when they ran into each other on the sidewalk outside Cyrano’s General Store later that week.

“Shit,” Jim said. “With who?”

“With Monty Scott,” Chrissy said. “He thinks  _ Monty  _ mugged me that night and stole my jewelry and he still has my ring. It’s fucking unbelievable. A ring is tiny, you know? It could get lost anywhere. Monty  _ gave me my jewelry back, _ so why wouldn’t I believe him?”

“I don’t know. I can see why Roger’s mad about it. Is he okay? I mean, did either of them get hurt?”

“Roger broke Monty’s arm,” Chrissy revealed, her voice flat with disappointment, “but he broke his  _ left _ arm, like a dumbass, so Monty still got to hit him in the jaw with his good fist. Officer Komack saw them after that and broke it up, since I guess he decided he wants to actually do his job from now on. So, Roger’s face is all swollen up, but he’ll be okay.”

“Well, that’s good.”

Chrissy rolled her eyes. “I guess. Honestly, after all that, if he doesn’t clean up his act then I don’t know if I want a new ring, after all.”

“Oh, Chris. I’m sorry.”

She shrugged and let out a little sigh. “It’s okay. I mean, I don’t know. I’ll be okay. Anyways, I wanna have a party tonight, ‘cause I feel like everyone has been really edgy these past couple days. The whole town feels tense. Will you come?”

“On a Thursday night?”

“Do you have somewhere better to be?”

He thought about whether he’d go up to the old Grayson house again. He wanted to continue surveillance, but he was still shaken by what had happened that night when Spock saw him out there. It felt like he had been possessed. “Nah, I guess not. You gonna be in the old barn like usual?”

“Yeah. Monty’s gonna be there for sure, ‘cause he went to get a cast on his arm and we all wanna sign it, and Leila’s gonna be there, and Pavel, and Nyota, and Hikaru and Geoff, and I think Hikaru said he was bringing some guy he met at school this year who’s coming into town to visit him, and that’s all I know for sure so far. Oh! And I think Leila’s gonna bring her friend Mary Jane,” Chrissy added with an unsubtle raise of her eyebrows. Jim noticed she hadn’t invited Roger. “Anyhow, see if you can get Len to come with you, too. I feel like I’ve barely seen him since the baby was born, even though he still only lives fifteen miles away.”

“I’ll call him up and see,” Jim said doubtfully.

“Thanks, Jim. You’re great. See you tonight!”

 

***

 

After that, Jim was back at Happy Petals, striding in and smiling genuinely when he saw Hikaru standing up on his toes to water some hanging plants.

“Hey, ‘Karu, are you coming to Chrissy’s barn tonight?”

“You know it, baby. It’s gonna positively outta sight,” Hikaru said, grinning right back at Jim as he crossed buoyantly to the other side of the floor, spinning around gracefully on his heels before squatting down to reach the pots of sunflowers on the floor.

“What’s gotten into  _ you _ today?” Jim asked, laughing.

“Nothing’s gotten into me. It’s just a beautiful day today, you know?”

“Uh-huh,” said Jim skeptically. “So, who’s this guy Chrissy said you’re bringing to the party?”

“His name’s Ben,” Hikaru said, deliberately avoiding Jim’s eyes by busying himself with the plants. “He’s, uh, one of my friends from Columbia. His family lives in upstate New York. I’m going to pick him up from the bus depot in Iowa City when Leila gets here in an hour.”

“Yeah? Well, he must be a pretty good friend to come visit you all the way in Riverside when you’re gonna see each other next year.”

“He is!” Hikaru answered, a little too quickly. “He’s a really good friend. He’s, uh, he’s really great. He’s a composer. I mean, he studies music. He’s great.”

“Hey,” Jim said, finally getting Hikaru to stand up and look at him. “That’s great, man. That’s really, really great. I can’t wait to meet him.”

Hikaru beamed. “Thanks, Jim.”

“Sure,” Jim said. “Hey, have you had any more visits from—Shit,” Jim broke off as he caught sight of a familiar figure approaching in the window. He ran to the back of the store to duck behind the counter. “Act normal and  _ don’t let him see me,”  _ Jim hissed at Hikaru from his hiding place low on the floor, pressed flush against the back of the counter.

“Jim, what—”

The bell on the door jingled and Spock walked in.

“Hi, how are you today?” Hikaru greeted him smoothly.

“I am well,” Spock said, and Jim hated that his heart beat a little faster hearing that voice.

“What can I get for you?”

“I found the composition of my most recent purchase to be satisfactory, and would like to repeat the order.”

“Okay. That was the bouquet with the red roses and calla lilies, right?”

“Correct.”

“Just one today?”

“That will suffice.”

Then the only sound in the room was the sound of Hikaru’s footsteps and the rustling of the plants as he gathered up the components for Spock’s floral arrangement. He circled around to behind the counter, and Jim made himself as small as possible to avoid any chance meetings between Hikaru’s boots and any of Jim’s extremities.

Jim heard the snipping of shears, then more rustling—

“That’ll cost eight dollars. Do you want a bag?”

“That will not be necessary.”

—the sounds of the cash register as Spock paid for his flowers—

“Here you go, careful of the—oh, shit, sorry about that!” Jim bristled when he heard the note of panic in Hikaru’s voice. “Just sit tight, let me get you a band-aid, okay? Here, I’ll take these back and strip off the thorns for you, no charge.”

“That is not—”

“No, no, it’s okay, just gimme a second.”

Hikaru bent down and sharply gestured for Jim to move to the side. When Jim didn’t respond quickly enough, Hikaru pushed him out of the way with his forearm and retrieved a tin first aid box from a shelf hung underneath the counter, just behind where Jim’s head had been.

There was a muffled clang when Hikaru set it on the counter, and some rattling as he opened it and searched for the right container.

“Here, let me see your… _ hand  _ oh my god. Oh my god, what is that—that’s not blood. Are you—” Hikaru’s voice cut off abruptly. 

“My mind to your mind,” Jim heard said from above him. That was Spock, his voice low and hurried, almost frantic. “My thoughts to your thoughts.”

There was a wide stretch of silence as nothing happened.

Stillness, and then:

“Forget,” said Spock’s voice, softer than Jim had ever heard it.

Jim stared intently at Hikaru’s shiny black heeled boots, waiting for them to move.

There was another rustling noise, and after that the only sound came from Spock’s heels dimly striking the floor.

The bell on the door jingled.

The door fell shut with a wooden thud.

Hikaru’s boots took a stumbling step backwards and Jim looked up to see Hikaru dazedly looking around until his eyes fell on Jim.

“Jim… what the hell are you doing under there?” Hikaru asked, lifting a hand to rub absently at his temple.

Jim got to his feet. “What do you mean? Spock was just in here. You just sold him a bunch of flowers.”

Hikaru looked at him vacantly. “Who’s Spock?”

Oh, no.

Well, Jim thought with futile hope, it wasn’t like the guy gave out his name like candy. “You know, the guy who was  _ just _ in here, with the sunhat?”

“Jim, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“He’s come in before! I ran into him on the way in the other day. He’s always wearing these jumpsuits, and this… hat…” he trailed off, seeing no signs of recognition in Hikaru’s face. 

“No one else has come in since you got here, man. I mean, we were just talking about the party tonight, and then—” Hikaru cut himself off, wincing. His eyes landed on the first-aid kit, still lying opened on top of the counter. “I—sorry, man, I think I just need a minute. I’m kind of out of it all of a sudden. I think I just…spaced out for a while. Would you mind?” Hikaru weakly indicated the door.

“Yeah, um, sure. I’ll see you tonight, okay?”

“Sure, Jim. Yeah, at Chrissy’s barn. Bye. Sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

_ Holy shit, _ Jim thought as he turned and left the store, shaking his head with disbelief.

Holy shit, this was  _ real. _

 

***

 

When Jim got home, the first thing he did was go to the phone and try to ring up Bones.

The phone rang, and rang, and  _ rang  _ until the call disconnected itself.

He tried again thirty minutes later, and still got nothing.

Even when it was time to head over to Chrissy’s, he hadn’t gotten through once.

 

***

 

“That is not a balalaika. My grandmother played the balalaika. A balalaika is like this,” Pavel was saying, holding his hands out as though playing a guitar, “with a big triangle and a neck like a guitar and only three strings. It’s a beautiful Russian instrument—the most beautiful instrument in the world,” he declared proudly.  _ “This _ ,” he said, indicating the strange instrument that had been sitting in the trunk of Jim’s car since he’d bought it from Mudd’s, “is no Russian instrument. It’s too complicated and unwieldy. It lacks elegance, you know?”

“Oh. Well, thanks, Pavel. Do you know what it is, then?”

“No idea! Where’d you get it?”

“I just picked it up at Mudd’s the other day. Scotty said he thought it was a balalaika, ‘cause the guy who brought it in said it was Ukrainian.”

“Balalaikas aren’t Ukrainian. He means a bandura.”

“Is that what this is, then?”

“Not even close.”

“Oh. Well, okay.”

“I’m gonna head back inside, you coming?”

“Uh, yeah, in a minute, but could you find Ben—Hikaru’s friend—and tell him to come out here? Just tell him I have this cool foreign instrument and I wanna see if he knows what it is.”

 

***

 

“I don’t know what it is,” Ben said, “but it’s  _ cool.  _ Do you know how to play it?”

“Nah, I just bought it on Sunday.”

“May I?”

“Go for it.”

Ben bent down and picked up the instrument, leaning against the rear bumper of Jim’s car to support himself as he tried holding it at a couple different angles. He plucked a few of the strings in sequence experimentally and winced. “I think it’s seriously out of tune, maybe from the temperature if you’ve been keeping it in your car, or it could be using a really weird tonality.”

“What does that mean?”

“Uh, basically just that it might not be compatible with Western music,” he explained, starting to fiddle with the tuning knobs on the neck. “So you could use it for whatever the native music is in the culture that developed it, but you couldn’t play, you know, Bach, or The Beatles, without changing the tuning. Which you probably could do, but you might need to get new strings depending on how much these wanna stretch. The timbre is really nice, though. There are some really interesting harmonics happening. It sounds beautiful, just  _ weird.” _

“So, you don’t know what it is? Or where it’s from?”

“Sorry, no idea. Do you mind if I keep playing around with it tonight?”

“Yeah, knock yourself out, just let me know if you and Hikaru are gonna leave before I do so I don’t lose track of it.”

“No problem. Thanks, man.”

Ben stood up straight, grinning at the instrument and starting to walk back to the half-open barn doors.

“Hey,” Jim blurted, “has Hikaru been feeling okay tonight? Is he acting normally?” 

Ben stopped and looked at him with concern. “Yeah, he’s doing great. I mean, I guess he said he had a headache earlier, but that’s all. Did something happen?”

“No, nothing. It’s nothing, don’t worry about it.”

 

***

 

“It’s too bad Leonard couldn’t make it,” Chrissy said. She and Jim had climbed up to the  loft, and they were curled up beside each other, leaning against long bales of straw, taking turns drinking from the same bottle of Jack. Beneath them on the floor, they could hear talking and laughter and brief flashes of distorted song and radio chatter intercut with Scotty and Nyota’s voices complaining about interference and weak signals, trying without success to get the portable radio to pick up any station without deafening static.

“Yeah, I guess he has to go to work tomorrow, so…” Jim trailed off, not wanting to reveal that he hadn’t even been able to get through to Bones in the first place.

“I miss him. And I feel bad, ‘cause you know, he always wanted to be a doctor so bad and now I just got into med school and I’m going to be able to do it before he is… Do you think he’s avoiding me because of that? Do you think he resents me?”

“No, Chrissy, I don’t think so. He wouldn’t avoid you, or any of us, on purpose. He just doesn’t have a lot of time anymore, you know, with everything.”

He thought Bones wouldn’t avoid any of them, anyways. There must’ve been some simple reason that he hadn’t answered the phone all evening. He was just busy, that’s all.

Chrissy took a drink and passed him the bottle.

“Yeah, I guess,” she sighed.

He took a drink and passed it back.

“Anyways, I guess I’m just shaken up from, um, what happened last week.”

“Yeah.”

“Roger’s been acting so shitty, ever since it happened. It’s like he’s a different person, I mean, breaking Monty’s arm? He’s never been like that! I think he’s upset with me, ‘cause he thinks I was out with someone else and I’m lying about it, but I wasn’t. I was just sitting around at home, and I wasn’t even getting high or anything, and then I remember just feeling so  _ hot  _ all of a sudden, I felt like I was suffocating, so I went out to the porch to get some fresh air, and then—” Chrissy’s face suddenly contorted in pain and she pressed her hands to her forehead instinctively to try to relieve the pressure.

“Are you okay, Chris?” Jim leaned in, put a steadying hand on her shoulder.

She nodded tightly. “Yeah, I’m okay. I just can’t remember anything,” she said, looking at Jim with open dismay. “I can’t remember anything that happened before your ma woke me up on the side of the road the next morning. I don’t know what happened to me, Jim,” she said. A sob escaped her throat.

“Whenever I try to remember, it just makes my head hurt.”

Like Hikaru.

Jim immediately gathered her up in his arms, running a hand soothingly up and down her back. “It’s okay, Chrissy, you’re okay,” he whispered, over and over, letting her cry into his chest and trying to make himself as comfortable for her to lean on as he could. They stayed like that for a while, surrounded by the warm sounds of the party that drifted  up from the barn floor underneath them.

Nyota finally got the radio to work, and one of the middle verses of  _ Rhiannon  _ suddenly filled the air. She and Scotty both starting singing along, laughing brightly and all but drowning out the radio.

_ She is like a cat in the dark, and then she is the darkness. _

_ She rules her life like a fine skylark, and when the sky is starless… _

Jim smiled, teary-eyed, and held Chrissy closer when he heard her gently hum along with the chorus, even as sobs shook her body.

_ All your life you’ve never seen a woman taken by wind… _

He could never go back in time and keep Amanda Grayson safe, but he could keep Chrissy safe now. He knew now what kind of witchcraft Spock was capable of, that he could do anything he wanted and then just reach inside someone’s mind with those long fingers and wrench out their memories. His eyes alone were enough to infiltrate someone’s brain and twist it around until they felt and thought and moved without knowing why, without remembering they’d done it. He’d done that to Chrissy, and he’d done it to Hikaru, and he’d done it to Jim, and god only knows what else he was planning. 

_ Dreams unwind… _

 


	4. Love is a Stranger

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> a little chapter w/ a big reveal!!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “And **love is a stranger** who’ll beckon you on  
>  Don’t think of the danger, or the stranger is gone.”  
> - _You Only Live Twice_ , Nancy Sinatra, 1967

 

Jim woke up the next Sunday feeling filthy and sick to his stomach, trembling with the aftershocks of a nightmare. Opening his eyes was like dragging himself up to the surface and putting his head above water after spending all night at the bottom of a lake. The specifics of the fantasy were already falling out of his memory, but there were images that clung to him like leeches in his wakefulness. He had been taunted by slinking black cats that slipped away into alleys where he couldn’t follow and he had been ridiculed by cackling ravens, shedding black feathers as they rustled their wings. He had looked into Amanda Grayson’s eyes, laughing and kind, the way they had always looked in his ma’s photo albums. Then her eyes had shifted and grown cold and her face was Spock’s face, and Spock was saying to him _my mind to your mind, my thoughts to your thoughts_ and shamefully, despairingly Jim had welcomed the infiltration, grasping at the two halves of his own brain and spreading them apart to form a hollow space where Spock’s consciousness could rest. When he’d first opened his eyes, he’d thought that he could feel the warm, solid weight of a body pressing into him from above, and he didn’t need to guess at whose weight he’d imagined—or why he’d wanted to feel it.

“Jesus christ,” he said to no one, scrubbing at his unwashed face with his hands. He wondered if there was some lingering enchantment poisoning his thoughts or if he had just conjured it all unbidden from his own heart. It was only a small consolation that he hadn’t woken up with a hard cock.

The alarm clock on the overturned crate he used as a bedside table told him it was past ten already and another hot gallon of shame poured through his system.

He heard voices coming in from the kitchen, so he rose up and dressed quickly in casual clothes, leaving his shirt untucked.

But by the time he arrived in the entryway of the kitchen, Winona Kirk was standing alone at the kitchen counter, pouring herself a fresh mug of hot coffee from the pot. Jim looked around the room and saw nothing out of place—until he noticed the photo album lying open on the table.

“Hi, Jimmy,” Winona said pointedly. “It’s nice to finally see you awake.”

“Oh come on, man, it’s Sunday,” Jim said, slumping a little.

“I’m your mother, Jimmy, not your ‘man.’”

_“Ma.”_

Winona just pursed her lips, taking her mug and going to sit at the table. Still feeling groggy, Jim grabbed a mug from the wooden rack above the sink and got some coffee for himself. It poured out dark brown-back and the light from the ceiling lamp bounced off of the surface, forming wavering ripples upon impact when he set the mug on the counter; it looked just like the eyes from his dreams.

He crossed to the fridge and added a splash of half-and-half so that he wouldn’t have to think about it.

“Was someone just here? I thought I heard another voice.”

Winona nodded. “It was your friend Spock here to see you. Of course, I told him you were still asleep—if I’d known you’d be coming out so soon, I’d have asked him to stay, but I just said you would call him when you finally got up.”

Jim gaped.

“Did he tell you what he wanted?”

Winona shook her head. “No. He just came over about an hour ago—I offered him coffee, or breakfast, but he wouldn’t have it—and then he asked if he could take a look at some of our old photo albums. I’m not sure why…”

Jim left his coffee on the counter and moved right to the table. The album was opened to a page with a collage of photos of Winona with Jim’s dad…and standing in between them in at least half of the pictures was Amanda Grayson. She was really beautiful, Jim noticed. She had big, dark eyes and she just looked so bright and so alive in every photograph.

“You know, it’s funny, Jim, he really reminded me of someone I’ve met before.”

Jim closed the photo album and took the seat across from her.

“It was someone Amanda knew. She met him in… well, actually, it was a month or two before she was reported missing. He was, um… god, I can’t think of what he looked like for some reason. I think he looked just like Spock somehow, but I couldn’t describe him to you.” She thought for a moment. “Well, he was tall, and very serious, and _very_ intelligent. I remember he was some kind of scientist, visiting Riverside as part of a research operation. Amanda said he was cataloguing the native ecosystems, looking at all the plants and animals and things like that. He was visiting on this research grant from a foreign university. I think he might have been a professor, actually.”

“Do you know where?”

Again, Winona shook her head. “Mm-m. I don’t remember. He told me once, but I don’t remember. He was nice, though. Well, in his own way. He was a little cold. Amanda liked him a lot; they were always spending time together, to the point that George and I started to miss her. For us, it was really like she was gone even before she was missing.”

“And you said he looked like Spock?” Jim asked, biting his cheek, waiting to have his suspicions confirmed, along with his fears.

“Yes, he did,” Winona said, brows furrowed. “Something about Spock was just like him. I don’t know… I can’t think of what he looked like now, but it was something.”

Jim swallowed.

“Do you have any pictures of him in here?”

“No. Sarek said he hated being photographed, and Amanda would even stop me and George if we tried to take any while he wasn’t paying attention.” She smiled at Jim. “Why are you so interested all of a sudden?”

He shrugged, and then got up from his seat. “Just curious, I guess. I think I’m going to go see Spock now, since he was looking for me.”

Jim raced back into his room to grab his car keys and quickly checked to make sure the cassette recorder wasn’t sitting anywhere in his room, meaning it would still be in the car, grabbing a jacket from the back of his chair so he’d have somewhere to conceal it when he confronted Spock.

“Aren’t you going to drink your coffee, sweetheart?” Winona asked him on the way out.

“Nah. I’m already feeling awake on my own. Bye, ma, I’ll see you later tonight, okay?”

“Okay, Jimmy. Don’t drive too fast out there,” she said, already turning her attention to the morning paper.

 

***

 

Four and a half minutes later, Jim veered into the driveway of the old Grayson house, spraying gravel a yard clear of the car, and left it sprawled diagonally across the drive when he got out and stormed up to the front door of the house.

He took a deep breath.

He knocked.

He waited.

Spock answered the door, his pale face framed between dark hair and a high-collared black tunic. He hadn’t bothered with the stupid hat or glasses which meant that he knew that Jim knew what he was. The visual effect of the sharp, pale features that seemed to float beneath his glossy hair and above the velvety fabric of his shirt was the same as that of a crescent moon reflected in the black water of a lake at midnight. His face was cool and impassive, his calculating eyes betraying nothing. He might as well have been an oil painting: lustrous and immobile.

Jim punched him, aiming right at his stoic, unyielding mouth.

It sent Spock stumbling back into the house and Jim rounded in after him, furious.

“You listen here, you sick pointy-eared freak,” Jim spat, grasping at the fabric of Spock’s collar and holding him fast with a fist at his throat, “I don’t care how powerful you are, or whatever spell you’re going to cast on me, you _stay away from my mother._ Don’t you ever come near my house again or I’ll kill you.”

Spock looked infuriatingly unruffled by the confrontation.

“I apologize for my transgression. I had gathered through observing your behavior that trespass and invasion of privacy were not considered offensive in this locale.”

“It only counts as trespassing when it’s _your_ house, asshole.”

“I am the sole current resident of this building. By all reasonable metrics, I believe it would be considered my house.”

“This is Amanda Grayson’s house.”

Spock suddenly wrenched himself from Jim’s grasp. He crossed back to the entryway in three wide steps and sharply pulled the front door shut.

“What do you want, Jim?” he asked, standing in between Jim and the only clear route of escape but not turning back to face him. He rubbed at his face where Jim had hit him, feeling out the damage.

“I want you out of my town,” said Jim, standing his ground.

“I assure you, I intend to leave Riverside at the earliest opportunity. Regardless, I was under the impression that a township is not the sole property of any individual. Least of all you.”

“Yeah, well as far as you’re concerned,” Jim said, glaring, “neither is a person’s own mind.”

“I do not know what you are insinuating.”

“Like hell you don’t,” Jim scoffed. “I know what you did to Chrissy, and Hikaru, and to _me._ I know you can make people feel, think, and act without knowing why, without even remembering what they’ve done. I know that you can do whatever you want and then just reach in and make someone forget all about it. You did it to me just by looking at me.”

“That is impossible,” Spock said, whirling around. “I have never touched your mind.”

“Jesus christ,” Jim breathed, taking a step back. Spock, wide-eyed, held his hand up to cover his face, but too late.

“You’re not human,” Jim said.

Spock let his hand fall down, defeated.

“I am not.”

 


	5. Starman

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “There’s a **starman** waiting in the sky  
>  He’d like to come and meet us,  
> But he thinks he’d blow our minds.”  
> - _Starman_ , David Bowie, 1972

 

 

It wasn’t that Spock’s bottom lip already looked painfully swollen from its encounter with Jim’s fist. It wasn’t the wide, wild look of panic in his eyes, or how quickly he had thrown up his hand to try to hide his face. It was that there at the corner of his mouth, trickling out over his lip and towards his chin, Jim had seen a trail of something dark, and wet, and _green._

The ears and the eyebrows could be accounted for with makeup, or even some bizarre operation. Freaky, but ultimately mundane—same with the weird fashion sense and uptight speech patterns.

But there was no medical condition or cosmetic surgery or matter of taste that could explain a person having green blood.

“What are you?” Jim asked, feeling like he might throw up. “Are you some kind of demon? A vampire? An incubus?”

Spock raised an eyebrow, taking in the implications of Jim’s line of questioning.

“I am a vulcan,” he said finally.

Jim balked. “What the hell is a vulcan?”

“I mean to say that I am from the _planet_ Vulcan.”

“Bullshit.”

“Pardon?”

“Well, first of all, there’s no such planet in the solar system. I mean, unless I flunked junior high science class without knowing it. I get the sense that you’re pretty far out of touch with society, but come on. Even if there _is_ a planet Vulcan, what are the odds that it would even support life, much less superficially human life like you?”

“It is impossible to calculate without comprehensive data on all life-bearing and non-life-bearing planets throughout the universe, but the odds have been estimated as less than point-zero-one percent. With a significant margin of error, of course.”

“And Vulcan is in that point-zero-one-percent of planets that bears life?”

“Indeed.”

“And it’s somewhere outside our solar system?”

“The vulcan star system is located sixteen light-years from your own.”

“So how long did it take you to get here?”

“Approximately one-point-three of your Earth weeks.”

“You know, you’re not really doing a great job at making your story sound plausible.”

“I am only relating the facts.”

“Well, your ‘facts’ are pretty hard to swallow. I don’t believe it.”

“And yet you are willing to believe that I am a supernatural being, as described in Earth mythology?”

“Hey, there’s gotta be some explanation for all that freaky shit you’ve pulled. At least Earth mythology has a basis on _Earth.”_

Spock finally dared to approach him, and Jim fought the impulse to retreat.

“I think you will find with some closer examination that many of the recurring threads of Earth mythology have their roots in encounters with the extraterrestrial.”

Too overwhelmed to run down that rabbit hole, Jim just rubbed his face tiredly. “Do you have somewhere I can sit down?”

“I—...yes. Follow me.”

Spock swept past him and over to the main staircase, which he ascended without pause despite several loose, creaky steps and one that had rotted away underneath and almost gave out when Jim tried to put his weight on it.

He led Jim up to the second story landing and down a hall to the right until Jim’s feet landed on the plush surface of a familiar red and brown rug. This was the room he had spied on from the tree in the yard. Spock held out a hand, indicating a leather armchair tucked away beside a bookshelf in a corner of the room that Jim hadn’t been able to see from his vantage point the other night. Over on the other side of the room, that crystal chandelier was still spread out dismantled across the floor.

Jim sat there in the armchair, and Spock deftly carried the wooden desk chair over to sit across from him. He sat with his back rod-straight like it always was and his hands clasped loosely in his lap. Jim leaned in, searching Spock’s appearance for evidence of his alleged outer-space heritage. He really looked remarkably human at first glance, if it was true—when the ears weren’t factored in, at least. There was the sickly bluish swelling around his bottom lip, and the green blood still dripping from his mouth, but besides that, Jim thought that there was very little to mark his otherness. Externally, his complexion was well within the normal range of human coloration; the same was true of his dark hair and eyes, striking as they were. Staring up at those eyes, Jim focused for the first time not on Spock’s bottomless pupils but on the whites. The tear ducts at the inner corners were pale green, and Jim could see that the few visible blood vessels scattered across the surface were the same color. It wasn’t just to conceal his eyebrows that Spock always wore those shades, then. Jim thought of those leather gardening gloves that Spock had worn to Happy Petals and his eyes jumped to Spock’s hands and he noticed a band-aid plastered around the tip of his right index finger.

The encounter Jim had overheard between Spock and Hikaru suddenly fell into place: Hikaru had seen Spock’s green blood when he pricked himself on a thorn from that bouquet of roses and Spock had retaliated by indiscriminately wiping all of Hikaru’s memories of their encounters.

Holy hell.

Spock remained perfectly still under Jim’s scrutiny.

“Jim,” he said after a long moment.

Jim’s head snapped up, back to those hypnotizing eyes.

Spock continued: “Whether you believe what I have told you of my origins or not, you must understand that I cannot allow the truth to become public knowledge.”

“I won’t tell anyone,” Jim said instinctively.

“No,” Spock said. “You will not.”

Spock rose from his seat.

Jim stood up after him, straightening his spine and holding himself up at his full height.

“I am sorry,” said Spock, “but I cannot take you at your word. It is imperative that you forget.” He extended his right hand towards Jim’s temple, but Jim caught his wrist halfway.

“You don’t wanna do that, man.”

“It is necessary.”

“No, I mean, if you go through with it, then you’re going to be in serious trouble.”

Jim reached into his jacket and revealed the cassette recorder. There was a tape audibly reeling away inside, taking down their conversation. He held it at arm’s length behind him, out of Spock’s reach as long as Jim had his wrist.

“What is that?”

If Spock was really an alien from outer space, thought Jim, then chances were he wasn’t too much of an expert on the finer points of Earth technology.

“An audio recording device,” Jim explained vaguely.

Spock’s eyes widened perceptibly, and, like Jim had hoped, he started to fill in blanks that weren’t there, revealing what he was most afraid of: “You are transmitting this conversation to a third party.”

“Yeah,” Jim lied, “I am. And if he hears all this and I don’t remember it when I come back, or worse, if I don’t come back at all, then he’s going to know exactly what you did. He’s going to make the tape public, and not even you can erase the memories of every single person who watches the news.”

“I cannot,” Spock admitted.

Thank god Jim had guessed right on that one.

“So,” he continued, “if you don’t want to expose yourself to everybody on this whole planet, you’re going to tell me everything that I want to know. Okay?”

Deflated, Spock easily wrenched his arm out of Jim’s grasp and sank back down into his chair. “It would appear that I have no choice in the matter.”

Jim shook his head, a satisfied smirk appearing on his lips. He tucked the tape recorder back into the inner pocket of his jacket. “No,” he said smugly, “you don’t.”

“What do you wish to know?”

“I want to know why you killed Amanda Grayson,” Jim said, leaning back in his seat expectantly.

Spock bristled. “I did not.”

“Yeah, right. You may have just flown in from Vulcan, but you’ve been here before. You were right here in Riverside, Iowa in 1948…but maybe you thought I wouldn’t figure it out because you were using a different name back then. Isn’t that right, Sarek?”

“I am not Sarek.”

“Uh-huh. So you’re telling me there was another guy who came out nowhere, just like you, who hung out around Amanda Grayson in the weeks leading up to her disappearance, who had _something about him_ that reminds people of you, that no one can put their finger on? Maybe something like pointy ears? And maybe the reason no one can quite remember is because you made sure that they wouldn’t,” Jim accused. “You were here in Riverside in nineteen forty-eight, going by the name of Sarek, and you killed Amanda Grayson, and you’re here in nineteen seventy-six because you’re ready to kill again. I just want to know why. When I thought you were a vampire, I assumed it was to prolong your own life—but then, if Earth mythology has its roots in extraterrestrial encounters like you say, maybe I wasn’t wrong.”

“I have never been to Riverside before.”

“Then who was, Spock? Who was that murderer Sarek, if it wasn’t you?”

“Sarek,” Spock said, “is the name of my father.”

Jim swallowed his surprise, willing it not to show on his face. “So,” he ventured, standing up and circling around Spock’s chair as he dove into a new line of questioning, “it’s a family operation, then? How many generations back does it go? How many of your grandfathers came here to harvest young women like Amanda Grayson? Is that what you get out of it—fulfilling tradition?”

“Sarek was the first of my clan to visit Earth.”

“Then why did he kill Amanda?”

“He did not.”

“Why did he take a beautiful woman in the prime of her life and murder her in cold blood?”

“He did _not.”_

“What kind of sick enjoyment did he get out of it? What did he _get_ out of watching the life drain out of her eyes?”

Jim was in front of Spock again. He bent down low and leaned in until their faces were only inches apart.

“Why do you want to do the same thing so bad? Who’s it gonna be? Who is going to be _your_ Amanda Grayson? Is it Chrissy, the girl you already attacked once? Who do you _hate_ as much as your dad hated Amanda Grays—”

“My father did not hate Amanda Grayson,” Spock snarled, lunging forward without warning and suddenly the wooden chair fell to the floor with a thud and Jim’s back was on the rug and Spock was straddling him and his hands were wrapped around Jim’s throat.

“My father did not murder my mother!” he shouted, pressing down mercilessly on Jim’s windpipe. Jim stared up at him helplessly, struggling in vain against the inhuman—so much heavier than he had imagined—weight that was pinning him down to the floor. His field of vision started to close in, peripherals melting away into darkness until he could only see Spock’s bared teeth and wild eyes that were flashing with rage—deep, dark wells drained of sympathy. He sputtered, gasping desperately beneath Spock, felt himself losing oxygen, his thoughts slipping out of his head before he could form them fully.

Spock’s knee slid forward and it knocked against the tape recorder hidden in Jim’s coat.

Spock went still.

He released Jim’s throat and climbed off of him, tamping down his anger and schooling his face into a mask of phony indifference.

Jim clambered backwards until he felt his back pressing up against the smooth leather of the armchair. He was left coughing and gasping, trying to get rid of the thick mucus that had accumulated in his choked airways. “You—” he coughed again until it was comfortable enough to keep going. “You’re Amanda Grayson’s son.”

“I am,” Spock said calmly, getting to his feet and setting the wooden chair back upright in front of the mahogany desk where it belonged, looking nothing like a man who had just tackled someone to the ground and started choking them.

“That’s impossible. She died in nineteen forty-eight and she didn’t have any children.”

“She died three months ago,” Spock corrected, “and she is survived by two sons.”

“She was abducted. She disappeared without a trace. Not even her family knew what happened to her. Not even her best friends.”

“Secrecy was necessary, but my mother left Earth willingly.”

“She left Earth?” Jim asked incredulously, dragging himself up into the chair, still trying to catch his breath. He heard the mechanical click that meant his cassette was full. He didn’t want to risk drawing attention to the recorder and letting Spock inspect it closely by taking it out and changing sides, so he let it be. He had gotten enough already.

“She wished to return to Vulcan with my father. As she had demonstrated uncharacteristically high levels of intelligence and understanding for a human, my father acquired permission from the Vulcan High Council for her permanent residence on Vulcan.”

“This is insane.”

“It is the truth.”

“You keep saying that like it makes what you’re saying more credible. How do I know you’re not lying?”

“Vulcans do not lie.”

Jim rolled his eyes. “Yeah, I’m sure they don’t. If what you’re saying is true, then prove it to me.”

Spock looked at him impassively and said nothing.

“If you don’t,” Jim continued, reminding Spock of his leverage, “then the tape goes public and your secret is out.”

“If you would take me to the landing site in your automobile, then I can show you my spacecraft.”

 

***

 

Fifteen minutes later, Jim parked his car on the side of the road just past the bridge over the English River and let Spock lead him down a steep, muddy incline to the riverbank. Jim gagged at the stench of rotting trout that still lingered in the water despite the clean-up efforts that had been going on for the past couple of weeks. Carefully navigating the muck, they travelled along the edge of the water, in between the river and the band of trees that grew beside it, until they reached a place where a shallow groove had been worn into the mud, running down the bank from somewhere in the woods. When Jim looked down into it, he saw that there was a steady trickle of a clear liquid that looked more viscous than water running down the channel and emptying into the river.

Jim suddenly felt uneasiness bubbling up in his stomach. He didn’t know why, but if it weren’t for Spock leading him on, he was sure he would have turned and run back to the car without a second thought. Spock turned sharply and started walking into the woods, marking a path right alongside the mysterious stream.

It led them to a clearing—or more like a section of the woods that had been _cleared._ Splayed out from the center of the blackened ground were bowed and snapped tree trunks, lying down flat against the scorched grass. The air smelled like chemical smoke.

“So where is it?” Jim demanded. Everything about the clearing signified that it was an impact site, with the glaring exception that there was no spacecraft or anything like one in sight.

“It is here,” Spock said as he took a few steps into the clearing, both hands held up a foot or so in front of his chest. He stopped suddenly after moving about a yard towards the center of the clearing and moved his hands through the air as though feeling along the surface of an invisible object. Evidently finding what he was looking for, he extended an index finger and seemed to press against several points in sequence.

The air shook and shimmered like heat waves rising off of an asphalt road in the desert.

It crackled like a miniature flash of lightning.

Then suddenly it was there in front of them: a whitish sphere, a scant few yards across, half-supported by three metallic legs reaching down to the ground, lopsided and digging into the earth on one side because one of them had given out, presumably in the midst of a rough landing. There was a sharp crack on that side of the hull, and it was oozing a clear, sticky-looking gel—so that was the source of the river pollution.

“Well, goddamn,” Jim breathed, approached the vessel with fascination, examining its contours closely but not quite daring to lay a hand on it. “I guess I have to believe you now. You’re a space alien.”

“As I said, vulcans do not lie.”

Jim ignored him, excitedly circling around the craft, drinking in the sight of it. This was a spacecraft. A real, working spacecraft that had ferried a real, live extraterrestrial right here to Riverside. “I guess this answers the question about life on Mars,” Jim said, smiling to himself.

Spock, of course, didn’t get the reference. He just looked at Jim, mystified, with one eyebrow cocked. “I am from the planet Vulcan. There has been no sapient life on the planet Mars for hundreds of thousands of years.”

“Wait, so you’re telling me there _was_ —you know what, never mind. It’s not important.” He could ask about it later, if he wanted to. Right now…he reached the section of the hull with that vicious crack running down it and leaned in to get a closer look at the ooze. Once he got within six inches of it, his nose was assaulted by a nasty, caustic stench.

“Is _that_ what’s been killing all the fish?” Jim asked, recoiling, pinching his nose between his thumb and forefinger to ward off the smell.

“Unfortunately, yes,” Spock replied from close behind Jim’s shoulder.

“What is it?” He lowered his hand and stepped a few feet away from the offensive liquid in question.

“Coolant fluid. When the force of the impact breached the hull here, it also structurally compromised the engine chamber. Since the landing, it has been emptying all of its fluids steadily into your English River.”

“And you just left it here,” Jim accused.

“Without any vehicle to transport them, it would have been impossible to carry the leaking components to an appropriate site for disposal without arousing suspicion and increasing the risk of spreading the pollution farther.”

“Oh. Well, I guess that’s reasonable. Still, is it just going to keep poisoning the river until you get this thing up and running again?” Jim bent down, squinting at the collapsed leg of the spacecraft, wondering what exactly it was made of.

“As I have no way of repairing the craft using materials available to me on Earth, it will continue to pollute the river indefinitely, until the fluids have been exhausted.”

Jim stood and turned to face Spock then, leaning with one arm braced against the smooth hull of the spacecraft. “If you can’t fix it, then how are you planning on getting out of here?”

“Once I have repaired my communications system, I will be able to contact the Vulcan High Council and request a retrieval mission. At that time, myself and my craft will be beamed aboard a larger vessel and will no longer pose a threat to the river’s ecosystem. As I am still missing one of the key components of the transmitting system, this may take some time.”

“Time that this thing is going to be sitting here, leaking poison into the water and killing all our fish.”

“Indeed. However, if you are interested in hastening the process, there is something that you could do to speed my efforts.”

Jim bit his cheek, unsure if he wanted to know the answer, but asking anyways: “What do you need me to do?”

“I require the use of your automobile.”

“What for?”

“The missing component needed to repair my communications system is a certain focusing crystal. While no exact duplicate will be found on Earth, I believe that I can locate a serviceable alternative. As I have already searched all of the jewelers located within a reasonable walking or cycling distance, I require the speed of an automobile to widen the range of my search.”

“You want me to drive you around to a bunch of jewelry stores so you can replace your missing space crystal?”

“Indeed.”

“And once you find it, you’ll be out of here for good?”

“Likely within a week, yes.”

“Well, alright.”

“Indeed?”

 _“Indeed,”_ Jim replied, surprised to find himself smiling fondly at Spock, feeling a warmth spreading in his stomach that for the first time wasn’t rooted in revulsion or shame. “Now, come on, let’s get back to the car and we can figure out our game plan. You’ll need to tell me exactly what you’re looking for and show me what you’ve tried so far, and then we’ll work from there.”

Jim turned and walked out of the clearing, trusting that Spock was following close behind him all the way back to the car.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> BONUS CONTENT: now available on 8tracks, the playlist that I made to listen to while writing this fic! I'm liable to add tracks from now until the fic is completed, but I thought some of you might have fun listening to what helps me set the mood for the writing. Most of the songs do correspond to specific emotional moments in the plot, but not all of those moments have been published yet. Some of them are just songs I associate with the general tone and setting, or the relationships in this AU more generally. All of them are songs that I love!
> 
> LISTEN HERE: http://8tracks.com/perphesone/malleus-maleficarum


	6. A Little Sympathy

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “All that I want is someone to take care of me  
> I’m not asking for love, just **a little sympathy**.”  
>  - _Sugar Daddy_ , Fleetwood Mac, 1975

 

_“She died three months ago, and she is survived by two sons.”_

_“She was abducted. She disappeared without a trace. Not even her family knew what happened to her. Not even her best friends.”_

_“Secrecy was necessary, but my mother left Earth willingly.”_

_“She left Earth?”_

**_click_ **

“Jimmy, this is insane,” Bones said once he was sure the cassette tape had reached the end of its reel. “You have to take this to the police.”

“The police—come on, man, no! The _FBI_ couldn’t handle this, you know?” Jim said, pressing _stop_ on the tape player and leaving it on Bones’s coffee table. “So I’m pretty sure the Washington County police department isn’t going to have the first fucking clue.”

“And you do?”

Bones poured out another drink for himself into one of the crystal glasses sitting on the table and started working on it right away.

“Yes,” Jim said definitively.

“And what about you telling him you were broadcasting the recording back to someone? You can’t do that with a tape recorder.”

“Well, obviously not. I needed to bluff him to get the upper hand. Besides, since I played it for you now, _you_ know all that happened and you _can_ expose him to the public if he tries anything on me. Or at least, y’know, you can threaten to do it to get him to leave Riverside alone once and for all.”

“Jesus, Jim. What if he just figures he can do whatever he wants, and now he just knows that he needs to get _both_ of us out of the way to protect himself?”

“Relax, Bones. It’s not like I gave him your name and address or anything.”

“What a fuckin’ relief,” Bones said, rolling his eyes and knocking back the rest of his glass of whiskey.

Bones sighed. “Well, what are you going to do now? Why don’t you just threaten him yourself?”

“I told you, Bones,” Jim said impatiently, “I already threatened him; now I’m going to help him get out of here. I’m driving over to the house tomorrow and I’m gonna help him figure out how to get the crystal he needs.”

“Okay, Jim,” Bones said, shaking his head. “Look, you just gotta promise me that the second this thing goes belly-up—and it _will_ go belly-up sooner or later—that you’re gonna tell me and you’re gonna tell the police. You are not gonna handle this on your own like a goddamn idiot.”

Jim hesitated. “I’ll tell you, Bones. I’ll tell you everything, I promise.”

 _“And?_ Who else?”

“Take it or leave it, man. I don’t want the cops involved here. I just have a bad feeling about it, alright?” Jim avoided Bones’s gaze, using the excuse of pouring himself a drink to keep his eyes downcast.

“Fine, Jimmy, but if you’re not going to play it smart then don’t drag me any farther into this than you have already. I can’t go around risking my neck like you’re intent on doing. I—you know, I’m a father now.”

“I know, Bones,” Jim said, leaning back on the sofa.

A moment passed in silence. A thought occurred to Jim:

“Where is Joanna tonight, anyways?”

Bones poured himself another drink.

“Jocelyn took her up to stay with her parents again this weekend.”

“I know, but it’s Sunday night. They’re not back yet?”

Bones shrugged. “Apparently not.”

“Have you tried calling?” Jim asked, concerned. “What if something happened? I mean, what if her car broke down or something?”

“Nothing _happened,_ Jim, she just doesn’t want to be around me,” Bones told him, slumping back in his seat. He scrubbed at his mouth and jaw with the palm of his hand, looking like he was trying to decide whether his face was numb enough yet or not.

“What do you mean?”

“Exactly what I fucking said! She says I’m no good for Joanna, and I need to stop drinking, and I need to be a better parent even though I’m at work every goddamn day—I’m the one paying for all Jo’s stuff, putting food on the table, you know? I’m the one who had a fucking _dream,_ who had _plans_ for my life, and now I’m never going to be a doctor, and I never get to see my own goddamn daughter, and—…”

He broke off. His eyes were wet.

“I’m doing all I can, Jim,” he finished weakly, wringing his hands together in frustration.

Jim stared at him helplessly, feeling hot tears welling up in his own sinuses and biting them back. He reached out to put a comforting hand on Bones’s shoulder.

“I’m so sorry, Bones. I…I didn’t know it was this bad.”

“Of course you didn’t, asshole,” Bones said derisively, jerking his arm away and leaving Jim’s hand to fall uselessly down onto the couch cushion between them. “You’re too busy chasing around demons and space aliens and searching for magic fairy crystals to see anything else.”

_“Bones.”_

“Go home, Jim.”

“What?”

“You heard me,” Bones said, rising abruptly to his feet. “Get the hell out of my house, or—or I’m calling the cops on your Martian friend,” he threatened, voice unsteady.

“He’s not from Mars; he’s from Vulcan,” Jim said, standing up very slowly in response to Bones’s sudden movement.

“I don’t give a damn if he’s from the center of the Sun, Jim, as long as you’re gonna be fucking around with him I don’t want you hanging out here!”

“Come on, easy, man, you’re drunk.”

“Tell me something I don’t know,” Bones said, wobbling dangerously. Jim moved forward just in time to catch him under the arms and lower him back down onto the couch as he stumbled.

“It’s okay, Bones, it’s okay. Let’s get you into bed, alright?”

“Don’t you touch me,” Bones slurred out weakly in protest as Jim started to drag him bodily across the carpeted floor, covering the short distance from the living room into the bedroom and heaving him up onto the bed. He was still in his clothes—a button-down and jeans—but that would have to be alright, Jim thought, wincing inwardly as he imagined what Bones’s reaction to Jim trying to strip off his clothes would be like while he was in this state.

Still, he could yank down the covers from underneath him and pull them up again, doing his best to tuck Bones in as he tried to retaliate.

“Come on, baby, it’s okay, just get some sleep now, okay?” Jim babbled soothingly, stroking Bones’s hair back from his forehead with one hand and catching his loosely swinging arm in the other.

“Get your hands off of me or I’m calling the cops,” Bones muttered, even as Jim watched the energy to glare drain out of his eyes.

“Yeah, well, if you still want to call in the morning then go ahead,” Jim said softly. There was a sad smile on his face.

“I will,” said Bones definitively. Then he rolled over and buried his face halfway in the pillow.

Jim waited until he heard Bones’s breath slow down, taking on the steady rhythm of sleep. He watched that perpetual line in between Bones’s eyebrows smooth away when he fell unconscious; a few breaths later, it was back again. Jim guessed it was because he had started dreaming. He bent down and pressed a dry, gentle kiss to that crease, then got up off the bed and crossed the room to the door.

He lingered there in the doorway for a long, long minute—just looking.

He turned out the lights and closed the door behind him, then went back out into the living room and cleaned up their glasses and bottles. Only after everything was washed and dried and neatly put away did he head out to his car and drive home.

He went to bed that night uneasy, hoping he wouldn’t have any dreams himself.

 

***

 

Noon the next day found Jim sitting in the dining room of the old Grayson house, watching from across the spread of metallic parts laid on the tablecloth with fascination as Spock worked on some component or other of his broken equipment. As much as Jim had tried to press him, Spock refused to answer any questions about the technology or exactly what he needed to do in order to fix it. All Jim was allowed to know was that Spock needed a twin pair of crystalline rocks of some kind to help focus something or other at the right wavelength, whatever that was, but everything Spock had scrounged up from the pawn shops he could bike to was the wrong size, or the wrong cut, or unsuitable for the job based on some other obscure factor that Jim wasn’t given the privilege of having explained to him.

Coming to the conclusion that any interrogation about the transmitter or the spacecraft would be fruitless, Jim decide to try another line of questioning.

“What’s it like on Vulcan?” he asked. He kept his tone casual, but the sincerity of his interest was betrayed by the way he leaned in closer, arms laid out on the table in front him.

Spock’s hands stopped moving for just a second, and then resumed their work as he answered.

“The atmospheric conditions are remarkably similar to those on Earth—as you may have gathered by the ease with which I am able to respirate. However, the average temperature is significantly higher.”

“...That’s it?” Jim asked after a stretch of silence.

“As I am unfamiliar with your system of temperature measurement, I cannot be more precise,” said Spock apologetically, eyes turned down to his work.

“No, I mean, what’s it _like?”_

Spock looked up to regard him blankly. “Your query is so vague as to be meaningless.”

“Okay, well.” Jim thought for a moment.“What are the other differences between Vulcan and Earth?”

“The differences are innumerable.”

“Name one,” Jim challenged.

“I find the food on Earth to be thoroughly distasteful,” Spock said.

Jim laughed openly. “What have you been eating?”

Spock’s face was unreadable. “Plants,” he said.

“Just...plants?”

“Vulcan ideology values the respect and preservation of life above all else. While our forebears were omnivorous, at present our diet is strictly plant-based.”

“That’s cool,” said Jim. “So you’re a planet of environmentalists.”

“That is not an entirely inaccurate assessment.”

“You must be upset about your spacecraft polluting the river, too, then.”

“Vulcans are not an emotional species, and so I am not upset. I find the negative impact on your ecosystem to be unfortunate, but I recognize that it was unavoidable, given the circumstances, and will ultimately not have any particularly wide-reaching effects.”

“You don’t feel bad for all those little fishes?” Jim teased, half-serious.

“I am vulcan. I do not _feel,_ so to speak.”

“Aren’t you half human, too?”

“I am finished here,” Spock said abruptly, standing and looking at Jim expectantly as he pushed his chair in. “I require your automobile now.”

“What? Now?”

“As per our agreement,” Spock reminded him.

“Yeah, yeah, I know, but—”

Spock was already on his way out of the room. Jim scrabbled to get to his feet and followed behind, less elegantly, catching up in time to watch Spock grab his sun hat, shades, and gloves and settle into his rather conspicuous disguise with a practiced ease before heading out the door.

 

***

 

Following Spock’s instructions—he’d apparently not only gone through the yellow pages but studied a map—Jim took them to Cyrano’s Jewelry Palace, a jeweler a few towns over with a flashy sign out front that looked bigger than the store itself.

Spock strode in and immediately started talking shop with a man who introduced himself as “Cyrano himself” and shook Spock’s gloved hand in a vigorous way that left him visibly uncomfortable, leaving Jim to trail in after him and wait impatiently in the store like he used to when he was a kid and his ma dragged him along with her when she had errands to run.

To pass the time as he looked around between the cases of jewelry, he tried to imagine Vulcan.

He imagined the heat first, because that was all he had to go on. Dry heat? Or a swamp? Would there be white, gleaming cities pushing against the edges of wide expanses of wilderness, like the spacecraft in the forest on a planetwide scale? If vulcans valued the preservation of life, they must have had natural parks. Or else settlements that were integrated into the natural world without disrupting it. If they lived underground, they could escape the heat and leave the surface to the wildlife, couldn’t they? Did they live on the planet at all? Or were they out in orbit, flying around in space where there was nothing to disrupt?

Or, he thought, maybe there _was_ something to disrupt out there after all.

_Many of the recurring threads of Earth mythology have their roots in encounters with the extraterrestrial…_

Spock had said that, but maybe he’d just been trying to get Jim shaken up.

He’d also said that vulcans don’t lie—but if that wasn’t true, then probably none of it was.

Jim knew it was stupid to take Spock at his word, but for all the mystery and the unanswered questions, whenever he spoke he seemed guileless, like he didn’t see any point in hiding things that he didn’t need to hide.

So Vulcan was hot. Jim believed that at least, because Spock felt like someone with a fever, like a desert animal—Jim could feel the heat radiating off of him whenever they got close, noticed it even though they hadn’t touched each other since their fight that morning.

Spock was hot.

Really, really hot, and Jim had to admit that was part of why he wanted so badly to trust him despite all the shifty behavior that was left unexplained. He was just distracted; he kept catching himself leaning in towards that magnetic heat, wanting to sink into it and melt away, and…it was embarrassing.

Jim shook himself from his thoughts just as Cyrano and Spock started to talk prices.

“Ah, this ring? That’s a two carat diamond, you know, but I can offer it to you for only three thousand, four hundred, and _ninety nine_ dollars.”

_Holy shit._

“And,” Cyrano rushed to assure Spock, “of course we offer payment plans with _very_ low interest rates in the event that you’d like to put down only a small deposit to begin with.”

“That is exceedingly reasonable of you,” said Spock, and Jim thought he could hear a note of irony in his voice. “I assume that you can produce a certificate of authenticity for this gem. I have no particular interest in geology, and so I am unable to determine if your claims are true.”

“Oh, come now, sir, you can always trust Cyrano Jones to strike a fair deal,” Cyrano insisted, his voice and demeanor reminiscent of an oil slick.

“The certificate, please,” Spock said curtly, apparently unconvinced.

“...Of course, I keep them in my office,” Cyrano replied. “I’ll be right back in just a moment,” he said, turning and heading into the back of the store, leaving Jim and Spock alone with the jewelry cases and the diamond ring sitting exposed on the counter.

Jim watched as Spock produced a slate-colored, rectangular device from his pocket and aimed it at the ring. Colored lights blinked along the edge of the device.

“What are you doing?” Jim asked, and immediately regretted it when he caught the silencing look that Spock shot him.

“I am waiting for the proprietor of this fine place of business to return with the certificate of authenticity,” he told Jim sharply.

As though on cue, Cyrano emerged from the back office with a stiff sheet of paper in his hand just as Spock slipped the device back into his pocket.

“Here it is, sir, as you requested!” Cyrano waved the paper in front of Spock briefly before setting it on the counter between them.

“Thank you,” Spock said. His eyes scanned over the document, expression betraying nothing. He took care to meet Cyrano’s gaze and said: “I will pay you fifty dollars, and that will be generous.”

Cyrano looked at him with wide eyes, aghast. “ _Fifty_ —”

“I will pay you fifty dollars,” Spock repeated, “and then I will take this ring, and then I will not inform anyone that what you have purported to be diamonds are actually made of glass and that your certificates of authenticity are forged.”

“I assure you, sir—” Cyrano began to sputter, but Spock interrupted him.

“Do not attempt to argue. It is within my power to ruin your business.”

Cyrano opened and closed his mouth a few times without sound. “Are you...with the government?”

“I am not going to answer that question. I will only say that if you wish to continue in your corrupt business venture, then you will sell this ring to me for fifty dollars.”

“How do I know you’ll hold up your end of the bargain?” Cyrano demanded, puffing himself up indignantly.

“You do not,” Spock admitted. “I think it is clear, however, what the safest course of action is.”

Jim could practically hear Cyrano grinding his teeth.

 _“Very well, sir,”_ Cyrano gritted out, holding out his hand for the payment, which Spock readily supplied before taking the ring from the counter and putting it in his pocket.

“Thank you,” Spock said. He left the store, and Jim left with him, without another word.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you for being patient with this chapter! ❤ the details of the plot have started developing a little differently from what i originally planned, so i've needed to take some more time to rewrite sections and make sure everything fits with the slightly new direction


	7. Taken By the Wind

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "All your life you've never seen a woman **taken by the wind**  
>  Would you stay if she promised to you heaven?  
> Will you ever win?"  
> Fleetwood Mac, _Rhiannon_ , 1976

 

“How did you know that certificate was fake?” Jim asked, catching up to Spock about halfway across the parking lot.

“I did not,” Spock replied. He didn’t stop walking, but his steps fell in line with Jim’s—or Jim’s fell in line with Spock’s. “I inferred as much based on the fact that the jewels themselves are not authentic.”

“That thing you were using told you that?”

“Yes,” Spock confirmed. “A basic computerized scanner, used to analyze the material composition of a given object.”

“That’s cool! That’s… really cool,” Jim said, eyes fixed on Spock’s face. He realized that he had followed Spock right to the passenger side of his car, so he made a sudden move to open the door for Spock to try to cover up how distracted he was. Spock reached out at the same time and their hands met over the handle, just barely brushing across each other, and it was like an electric current held them in place until Spock snapped his hand back to his side and Jim took a step away from the car with his breath caught in his throat.

The moment passed; they didn’t meet each other’s eyes. Jim moved forward again to open the passenger door without interception and unceremoniously circled around to climb in on the other side.

“So, uh, are we ready to take you back home?” Jim asked once Spock had settled down beside him.

“My home is on Vulcan,” Spock reminded him sharply.

“You know what I meant. Anyway, your ma grew up in that house. That kind of makes it home for you, too.”

“Only yesterday, you were insisting that I leave.”

“Yeah, well,” Jim began. Had it really only been a day since he interrogated Spock? Since Spock showed him the spacecraft? Since he saw that slimy green blood oozing out of his mouth? “I guess I didn’t have all the facts then.”

“You do not have all of the facts now,” Spock said. His eyebrow quirked up and Jim was sure that his lips didn’t move, but Spock’s face gave him the impression of a wry smile all the same.

“Not for lack of trying, though,” Jim replied with a grin, leaning to check over his shoulder as he backed out of the parking space. “So, how’d you know to scan that rock in the first place? Lucky guess?”

“Luck is immaterial. You recall that the transmitter requires a matching pair of focusing crystals?”

“Yeah. You only got one, though.”

“Only one was in stock. However, it does not matter. I have already acquired the other. A so-called diamond made of glass, no doubt also sold fraudulently by Cyrano Jones. It was only a matter of pinpointing the business where an identical counterfeit diamond could be found.”

“Where did you get the first diamond if you didn’t know he was the one selling them?”

Jim noticed Spock go tense. “I’ve just explained to you that it is not an actual diamond, rather a piece of clear glass set in a ring and falsely purported to be a diamond. Considering your desire to learn the facts of the matter, such inaccurate speech is—”

“You have Chrissy’s engagement ring,” Jim realized.

“To what engagement is the ring connected?”

“You have to give it back, man.”

“I—”

“Oh, _shit_ , poor Roger. He was saving up for that ring for months, and it’s not even a real diamond. We have to get Cyrano to give him his money back or something. We need to help him get her a real one.”

“We?”

“Yeah, _we._ Roger’s been going fucking crazy since Chrissy lost her engagement ring—since you _stole_ it, so if anyone owes them a new one it’s you. I’m only going to help you out of the goodness of my heart.”

“I do not understand why this is necessary,” Spock said, turning to Jim with stony impatience plain on his face. “What is the significance of this ring?”

“It’s an engagement ring. I told you.”

Spock looked at him expectantly.

“Oh,” Jim said. “I guess you don’t have weddings on Vulcan. It’s a sort of...commitment ceremony, between two people who are in love—well, ideally they’re in love. A lot of the time there are financial motives, or political, or the girl is pregnant. But when you get married, when you have a wedding, it’s supposed to be a commitment to spend your lives together and to be faithful to each other. For better or worse, in sickness and in health, ‘til death do you part.” He paused, having run out of breath. His cheeks felt a little hot. “Don’t you have anything like that where you come from?”

“There is a bonding ceremony,” Spock answered carefully. “It would seem to be analogous to what you describe.”

“Well, here on Earth, when you ask a girl to marry you, you give her a ring, usually with a diamond in it, and she wears it to show that she’s committed to somebody. So if she throws it away or loses it or just doesn’t wear it, it looks like she doesn’t really care about him.”

“...Fascinating,” Spock said. Jim watched his right hand move to turn over the blue pendant that hung from his neck to rest in the crook of his open collar. With effort, Jim tore his eyes away to focus on the road, only glancing over at Spock occasionally.

“I saw Roger’s guitar at the pawn shop the other day, too. Even if selling that got him enough money to buy a new ring—which it definitely didn’t because Harry Mudd is a crook, too—he shouldn’t have to give up playing just because he got ripped off by some con artist, you know? So we have to help him get a replacement somehow. A real diamond.”

“I will leave the finer points of that operation to you,” Spock said tersely after a moment, hands back in his lap and folded together.  “I trust you have not forgotten that I am currently rather occupied with the reparation of my transmitter systems so that I may return home to a planet that is sixteen light years away. Furthermore, the longer I remain on this planet, the higher my risk of revealing my extraterrestrial origins to humanity as a whole, thereby violating vulcan codes of ethics and irreversibly altering the course of Earth’s development.”

It was a fair point.

Jim’s eyes fell again on Spock’s shimmering pendant. Jim thought it was a flashy piece of jewelry for someone who otherwise presented himself as such a utilitarian.

“Are you married, Spock?”

“‘Bonded’ would be the closest approximation of the Vulcan term,” he corrected, “and no. I am not.”

“Oh,” Jim said. “Neither am I.”

“I had assumed.”

“Hold on. What are you trying to say about me, Spock?” Jim asked, cracking a smile.

“Only that you do not wear a ring, Jim.”

Jim was amazed by how comfortably the rest of the drive passed, with a little conversation and a lot of the rumble of the engine just quietly humming between them as Jim drove and Spock watched the trees passing by through the window.

“Hey, Spock, are you hungry?” Jim asked impulsively when he noticed that they were only a few miles from the exit that would take them to the Grayson house.

“I have consumed an adequate amount of sustenance and do not require more at this time.”

“Okay, well, have you ever had a milkshake?”

“I do not know what a milk-shake is,” Spock said, carefully repeating the new piece of vocabulary.

“Don’t worry,” Jim assured him with a grin, changing course to head for the Riverside Diner. He kept his fingers crossed that none of the girls he knew would be working their shifts today. “You’re going to love it.”

 

***

 

Hovering outside the diner’s bathroom door, listening to Spock retching into the toilet, Jim considered belatedly that maybe he should’ve predicted that a large double chocolate malted milkshake would be a little too much for an alien digestive system that was used to just eating plants, even if they _had_ split the shake evenly between them.  Even if Spock had been drinking it down eagerly all the way until he’d abruptly hurled half of it up across the shiny blue laminate surface of the table. Jim had guided Spock to the bathroom at the back of the restaurant and then rushed to help poor Janice clean up the mess. Jim had braced himself for interrogation, but she’d been surprisingly restrained—she just expressed concern for Spock, and didn’t press too hard to find out what Jim was doing with him in the first place. He was grateful that it was her waiting tables today instead of Chrissy, who Jim didn’t want to bring Spock anywhere near, or Nyota, whose questions would’ve been a lot harder to deflect than Janice’s curious expression and meaningful looks.

He leaned back against the smooth wall and scrubbed his hands down his face. He thought he heard Spock vomiting again on the other side of the door and thought that _had_ to be the last of it. But what did he know about vulcan stomachs? If he had a human mother then he couldn’t be _too_ different from Jim on the inside, right? Then again, half of a chocolate milkshake didn’t leave Jim bent over a toilet throwing up all of his insides like he was sick from drinking too much liquor.

And they’d been having a good time, too. Jim thought Spock had been having a good time, anyway. He’d been telling Jim about his home on Vulcan—softly at first, since they were in public, but it seemed like the more time passed, the more he warmed up and the looser his tongue got. He told Jim that his father was a scientist, and that he planned to follow in those footsteps, although he was unsure which specific discipline he would pursue. He was a student at an institution called the Vulcan Science Academy. He talked about his mother, about Amanda Grayson, who had liked to sing and wove sweaters on a loom and hung up windchimes made out of fossilized seashells. Although Vulcan was a desert planet, it had once been covered in oceans, and the remnants of ancient sea life were easy to find in the vast dried-up ocean beds that Amanda dug into as part of her work as an archaeologist. When she’d first moved to Vulcan, she’d taken up an interest in traditional instruments and had taught Spock to play something called a ka’athrya, which had to be the instrument Jim had bought from Scotty the other day. He still had it in the trunk of his car, but something kept him from mentioning it to Spock. It felt like something he’d stolen, shamefully, even though he knew it had been sold and he’d bought it fairly. Jim told Spock instead that he knew from old photos that Amanda had played the guitar when she lived in Riverside. Spock had taken a big sip of malted milkshake and then he’d asked if Jim would show him more of those pictures. He explained that he’d looked at some the day before when he came over to the farmhouse unannounced, but he’d had to leave quickly when he “sensed” that Jim was waking up in the other room. Jim didn’t get the chance to ask him what the hell _that_ meant, because that was when Spock threw up all over the table.

Jim heard the toilet flushing and then the sound of water running from the sink—he guessed Spock was rinsing his mouth out. Poor guy. But at least the worst of it was over now.

A few seconds later the knob turned and Spock emerged from the bathroom looking even paler and greener than usual.

“Hey,” Jim said softly, placing a tentative hand Spock’s sleeve, only because he looked like he might topple over if left to his own devices. “How are you feeling?”

“Ill,” Spock replied, sounding drained.

“I figured. Want me to take you home?”

“Yes. Please.”

Jim waved to Janice as he guided Spock out of the diner and she flashed him a conspiratorial grin that he didn’t really understand.

 

***

 

Barely over an hour later, Jim was sitting on the floor in the back room of Happy Petals, leaning against one of the shelves where they kept packets of seeds and empty clay pots, getting high with Hikaru and Leila. The shop was already closed for the day, of course, but Hikaru had only just locked the door about twenty minutes ago. Jim wasn’t sure how often Hikaru and Leila did this, but he only joined them once every couple of weeks or so. After spending the better part of the day with Spock, even though he couldn’t say he hadn’t enjoyed it, he was feeling wound up and in need of some normalcy. And anyways, Spock had refused to let him stay at the Grayson house and watch over him. He’d explained that he only needed solitude and meditation to recover. So Jim had gone home, determining that he’d just wait to check up on Spock until later in the night, and then he’d paced around his empty house until he started to crave company and felt like he needed to go out again, and that was how he found himself in the stockroom of the flower shop.

Leila was perched cross-legged on a big sack of potting soil, and Hikaru sat on the floor across from Jim.

Mostly it was Hikaru who was talking, and mostly about Ben.  Hikaru had dropped him off back at the bus deport just that morning, and Jim guessed that telling them about the time they’d just spent together was Hikaru’s way of trying not to miss Ben so much.

Jim loved it.

He hadn’t felt so warm on the inside in days. It was a relief, he thought, to hear Hikaru so excited just to feel that simple feeling—love—without the twin currents of fear and doubt that had been running through Jim’s own mind since his first encounter with Spock. There was always a little knot of fear in his gut since then, even when he couldn’t articulate what it was he was so scared of. Even now that he knew Spock didn’t mean him any harm, really, because he still didn’t know what Spock _had_ come to Earth for.

Hikaru was saying that the first thing Ben had done when they got back from the bus stop to Hikaru’s place had been to take out a tape player and play back a song he’d written for Hikaru. He’d played it on a piano—no words, just music, “but I felt like- like I knew exactly what that melody was saying, you know?”

“Uh-huh.” Jim and Leila both nodded.

“Even though there weren’t any words,” Hikaru went on, “it was still, um, communication. It was like a declaration!”

“Of what? Independence?” Leila asked slyly. She picked up a joint that had been set down and started trying to relight it.

“It’s obviously a declaration of love,” Jim said.

Hikaru ducked his head, grinning. “Um, I don’t know about that.” He bit his cheek, trying to hold back his smile as he looked back up at his friends.

“I mean, I really like him. I like him a lot,” he admitted.

It was obvious to anyone, but even just that took a lot of courage to say, and Jim found himself feeling strangely proud.

 

***

 

When Jim went back up to see Spock late that night, he brought some of the photo albums with him. Spock had wanted to see them, and Jim thought maybe they could look through them together. Maybe he could help Spock find whatever it was he’d been looking for when he came to the farmhouse the other morning. He hoped Spock wasn’t still feeling too sick to talk.

He knocked on the door, just in case, not really expecting an answer and not getting one.

The door was unlocked so he went in anyways.

He thought Spock must be upstairs in that room where Jim had spotted him through the window, just sitting there—meditating, but he stopped short of the stairs.

He had been resolved to see Spock that night, to make sure he was feeling better, but he suddenly felt like an intruder.

He didn’t want to leave.

After a minute of deliberation, he walked through to what he guessed he’d call a sitting room, with a sofa and a couple of chairs and a fireplace with a mantel over it. He hadn’t actually been in this room before, but he’d been able to see through to it from the front room or the dining room because the wide doorways had been left open, and the doors themselves were made of paneled glass anyways.

He sat down on the couch and, after a moment, put the stack of photo albums down on the floor in front of him. He immediately picked them back up because he realized he’d set them down in a thick, gray layer of dust. He brushed off the surface of the album that had been on the bottom, then made a clean spot on the floor with his sleeve and set them back down. He leaned back into the couch and wondered what the cushions were stuffed with. Horsehair, maybe. He was facing the hearth, and up on the mantelpiece was a line of old black and white and sepia photos that must have been members of the Grayson family.

A whole family tree, stretching all the way back to the origins of humanity, and now the heir of the family was an extraterrestrial from the planet Vulcan.

What would they have thought, if someone had told them? If that stern, gray man in the photo on the right, wearing a decorated military uniform, had been told that his great granddaughter would live and die and raise a son in outer space…

These were the thoughts that rocked Jim to sleep, right there on the stiff-cushioned couch in the sitting room in Amanda Grayson’s old house on the planet Earth, in the solar system, in the Milky Way galaxy.

Upstairs, Spock was meditating, sixteen light-years away from the planet where he’d been born.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's been a while lol, thank u all for being patient with me! Hope you enjoyed this latest installment :)


	8. What Drives Me to My Man

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> " **What drives me to my man**  
>  Earthly, or divine, or otherwise  
> is no business of mine."  
> \- _All Along_ , Perfume Genius, 2014

Jim woke up slumped over one arm of the couch. He felt vaguely sticky and he was stiff from sleeping in such a cramped position. He stretched his arms above his head and forward, arching his back like a cat. He squinted and rubbed his eyes blearily.

Then he noticed Spock sitting like a statue at the other end of the couch, staring at him. Behind him in the window the sky was like a field of periwinkles, flooded with pale color in the minutes before dawn. He was wearing a black robe—the one that Jim had seen him in through the window that night he decided to spy on Spock from the tree outside—and he was holding a photo album open in his lap.

“I brought-,” Jim began, then stopped to clear the sleep out of his throat. “I brought those over for you last night. ‘Cause you asked to see them, so I thought I could just, you know, go ahead and take them to you. But then I didn’t know if you were still meditating, and I didn’t want to interrupt, ‘cause I knew you weren’t feeling well, so I just came in here… I don’t remember falling asleep. I’m sorry. I hope I didn’t bother you.”

Spock nodded once, slowly. Then he gestured for Jim to come closer. “Are you the child in these photographs?” His voice sounded a little rough. Maybe he’d just woken up, too. Did vulcans actually sleep? Or did they just meditate?

“I don’t think so. I think these are all from before I was born, so…” Jim scooted in towards Spock, getting close enough to see the photo album but trying to leave a respectful distance between them.

The album was open to a collage of photos of Amanda Grayson with Winona—Jim guessed his dad must have taken these, since he was missing from all of them—and a blonde boy who looked around four years old. They were posing in front of a Christmas tree, smiling big. Jim didn’t think he’d ever looked at these before.

“Yeah, that’s not me,” Jim confirmed. “That’s my brother, Sam. I wasn’t born before your ma, um, left the planet, so I wouldn’t be in any pictures with her.”

“I see,” Spock nodded. “I gather that your brother no longer resides in this town.”

“No, he left home right after he graduated from high school. He’s out in San Francisco now.” Jim paused. “That’s in California,” he clarified. “It’s on the west coast. It’s a big city. But yeah, I haven’t seen him in ages.”

“I have not seen my own brother in some time, either.”

“Do you miss him?”

“Not especially.”

“I miss Sam sometimes, but mostly I wish he’d have stuck around longer for our ma’s sake, you know? I get that he was just looking out for himself, but I mean, after our dad died…” Jim ducked his head with a wince, embarrassed at his own openness. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this. It was a rough time, is all.”

Spock nodded and fell silent.

Jim looked at him. Up close, he could see that the rims of Spock’s eyes were inflamed with bright green. There were dried tear tracks running down his cheeks, vaguely shining in the pre-dawn light from the window. _Ah, shit._

“Hey,” Jim said softly. He stared at the embroidery on the hem of Spock’s left sleeve instead of looking him in the face. “I’m… really sorry about your mom, Spock. I’m sorry for the shit I put you through when you first got here, too.”

He watched Spock flip backwards in the photo album until he reached a certain page. Amanda Grayson was smiling at them, in the middle of a line of four people standing on a beach with a dark lake glittering behind them. She was wearing a checkered bathing suit.

“That’s my dad, standing to the right of her,” Jim pointed out. “I guess they were all pretty good friends.”

“Do you know which body of water this is?” Spock asked.

Jim furrowed his brows. He took the book gingerly from Spock’s lap and held it up to see the photo up close. “I think that’s Lake MacBride.”

“Are you certain?”

“Pretty certain. Ma used to take me and Sam there a lot when we were little.”

“Will you take me there?”

“Sure,” Jim said instantly. “Why?” he asked, as an afterthought.

“It seems that my mother liked it there,” Spock said.

“Okay. Let’s go tonight. I’ll come back here and pick you up tonight. ”

 

***

 

The moon reflected in the lake shone white like a flag floating on the water, waving in the wind. Jim watched as Spock waded out towards that flag like an astronaut walking into a field of stars, homeward bound. The water was now lapping at his knees, now swallowing his legs up to the hips, now wrapped around his waist and it looked like the lake was a part of him, belonged to him, a wide sheet of silk he could have picked up and draped around his shoulders and worn as a cloak.

He didn’t. Of course he didn’t. He wasn’t a wizard, after all. He couldn’t shape the water to his will.

He kept his back to Jim.

Jim watched him, bewitched, from the shore.

If he was saying anything, muttering any prayer or incantation, it was too far away and too private for Jim to hear.

If his face showed any grief, any of the human signs of mourning, then Jim wasn’t allowed to see it.

In his own secret ritual, under the light of the moon in the sky, in front of the moon on the water, Spock let go of his mother. He let her sink into the lake that she had loved more than any other lake in the galaxy. Jim wondered which she had loved the most: Earth or Vulcan. She must have loved the Earth, or Spock wouldn’t have traveled so far just to lay her to rest. She must have loved Sarek more, somehow. He thought about leaving Earth for Vulcan, knowing that he would never come back, that he would be cutting ties with everyone he had ever known. Everyone who had ever known him. She must have known. The thought made his head pound, like his brain was begging him to stop thinking about it. It was like contemplating death. What would it be like to have a love so big that it took you to another planet?

When Spock finally dragged himself up out of the water, his mission on Earth complete, his clothes soaked and heavy, minutes or hours could have passed and Jim wouldn’t have known either way. Watching Spock step onto the sand, dripping wet from the waist down, solemn and tired and still somehow magnetic, he barely knew left from right. He didn’t know anything except that he wanted to gather this poor grieving extraterrestrial alien man into his arms and hold him close and dry him off and keep him warm and safe. He wanted it suddenly and fiercely and he wanted it more than anything else.

He kept his hands to himself.

 

***

 

The drive home was quiet. Jim walked Spock up to the door and stopped there, not following him in but unable to turn and leave just yet.

Spock must’ve heard his footsteps stop, because he turned around.

“Are you expected elsewhere?” he asked.

Jim laughed. “Spock, it’s the middle of the night. No one’s expected anywhere.”

“I can’t imagine that’s… completely true.”

“Well, I don’t have anywhere to be,” Jim said, suddenly embarrassed. “That’s all I mean.”

“Would you—?”

“...Spock?”

“You could—stay.”

“I—yeah. Yeah. Okay. Do you mean—”

“Come inside please.”

“Okay.”

In the living room, Spock waited until Jim sat down on the sofa to sit in the chair opposite him. Not that Jim had ever seen him acting exactly normal by Earthling standards, but it seemed like Spock was in an especially strange mood. Jim could feel the tension in his body from across the room. He was sitting like there was a metal rod where his spine should be. His breaths came slow and even but nothing about him seemed relaxed.

After a while of Spock not saying anything, Jim broke the silence.

“Spock, are you all right?” he asked.

“Yes,” Spock replied instantly.

“Okay.”

Spock drew in a breath. “I have completed repairs on my transmitter and it has proven to be fully functional,” he said, like he was telling someone that their dog had died while they were at work that day.

“Spock! That’s great! That’s amazing, you got it to work!” Jim congratulated him, beaming. Then it sank in. “How do you know it works?” he asked urgently. “Did you contact someone?”

“I have contacted a representative of the Vulcan Science Academy.”

“...Yeah, and? Go on.”

“There is a Vulcan starship quite close to Earth presently. They have been notified of my circumstances and will be retrieving me at the earliest opportunity. They will also remove the remnants of my spacecraft and all of my other effects.”

“Oh.”

“I have also informed them of the pollution caused by the crash, and have been assured that an attempt will be made to remove as much of the contamination as possible before we leave orbit.”

“When are you leaving?”

“I’m not sure. I could have as many as ten days.”

“Could?”

“The ship may be delayed, or they may not be able to interrupt their current mission as quickly as expected.”

“Okay,” Jim said. “So, what’s the best-case scenario?”

“Best-case?”

“How soon could you be on your way home?”

“It is unlikely that the ship will reach Earth in any less than four days, given their current location.”

“Unlikely but possible?” Jim asked cautiously.

“Extremely unlikely,” Spock answered.

“Still. That’s… not a lot of time.”

“No.”

“Well, that’s. Good, right? You’re gonna get to go home,” Jim pointed out dumbly.

“I have repaired Christine Chapel’s ring,” Spock said.

“You have?”

“As soon as I successfully made contact with Vulcan and confirmed that a vessel was on its way to Earth, I dismantled the transmitter and replaced the crystal.”

“Wait, so how are you going to contact them again?”

“I am not,” Spock said, standing and crossing to a set of drawers by the window. “It will not be necessary. I did not want to depart without having returned the ring to you.”

He returned with the ring glinting in his hand and lowered himself onto the sofa. Jim cautiously made room, pressing himself against one arm rest to leave more than enough space for Spock to sit comfortably. But Spock still ended up closer than Jim expected him to. He could see the green in the corner of those dark eyes. He noticed Spock’s stubble and suddenly wondered how he’d been shaving. What did they use to shave on Vulcan? Did they still use razors? Some kind of laser? Had Spock brought one with him or was he using something he’d picked up on Earth? Or did Vulcans just grow their beards more slowly than humans?

Spock was holding an engagement ring and he was holding it out for Jim to take.

Fuck.

“Spock, you didn’t have to… I mean, it’s not even a real diamond.”

“No,” Spock conceded, “but there is a human phrase. Sentimental value. There are times when no replacement but the original will suffice, even when the object itself is of equal or greater monetary worth, or visual beauty. This would seem to be such a case.”

“I think you’re right,” Jim said warmly. He reached out and his fingers brushed against Spock’s and he felt a rush of fear that came from nowhere and changed the temperature of his blood. He took the ring and the feeling vanished.

He put it in his shirt pocket, and then it was just him and Spock on the couch, sitting too close, not saying anything.

Spock’s bangs were a little longer than they had been, but his nails were clipped short. Jim couldn’t stop himself from lingering over Spock’s throat, his jaw, the hollows of his cheeks, all shaded in with stubble now. It seemed to him like a strange miracle that Spock’s body, like his own, was changeable, was susceptible to the passing of time. How strange that Spock had hair and nails. He even ate. Jim knew that he ate plants but he had never seen it. Did he drink water? He hadn’t had any water at the diner. Desert animals would need less water than humans, and Jim knew now that Spock was a desert animal. Flesh and blood.

“I would like to give you something else,” Spock said. “You are under no obligation to accept it, of course, and it is slightly premature given that I am not departing presently, but I do not want to have left without offering you this,” he concluded, and then slipped the blue stone pendant off from around his neck, lifting it from where it had been hidden in the folds of his clothes and presenting it to Jim.

“I—…Spock, are you sure?”

“It belonged to my mother,” Spock told him.

“You want me to have it?”

“You are a credit to your species,” Spock said. “If it were not for your intelligence and generosity, and furthermore your discretion, my presence on Earth could have led to disastrous consequences for your planet and for mine. I regret that I cannot honor your contributions with more ceremony, but I do not think that other representatives from Vulcan would approve of subjecting you to any more exposure from extraterrestrial persons or artifacts.”

Jim smiled, less from the compliment than from the excitement of realizing that this was Spock’s trick: he would let out one piece of real sentiment, actually really bluntly, and then he would immediately cushion it with a series of related statements that dulled and distracted from the emotional weight it carried. He took the pendant and held it up to the light, watched it gleam. He faltered, about to slip it into his pocket with the ring, then changed course and lowered it over his head to hang around his own neck. The weight of the stone pressed down reassuringly on the center of his chest. He searched Spock’s face for confirmation of what he thought the exchange might mean. He found warmth, soft warm brown eyes, a green flush on the apples of his cheeks. All good signs.

“Would _you_ approve of subjecting me to any other extraterrestrial persons or artifacts?” Jim asked playfully, spurred on by the comfortable new energy that was buzzing between them.

“I must admit I have wondered what you would think of some places on Vulcan,” Spock said after a brief hesitation. “But,” he went on, _of course,_ “it is not my decision to make. There are too many risk factors. A temporary visit is highly inadvisable, if not impermissible. The primary condition of my mother’s travel to Vulcan was that she must not, under any circumstances, return to Earth, and I would not presume to implicate you in such an agreement.”

“Wait, what do you mean inadvisable?” Jim leaned back in his seat a little. He had felt a little rush of pleasure hearing that Spock had imagined him on Vulcan, but something about Spock’s reasoning rubbed him the wrong way.

“If you or any other human were heavily exposed to vulcan technology and culture, and then returned to Earth, the course of Earth’s development would be irrevocably altered.”

“Well yeah, but isn’t technological advancement a good thing? So what if I brought back some new information about space travel, or what if I went there and brought back some, um, efficient energy technology or something? I’m sure you have something really efficient powering the infrastructure on Vulcan, right?”

“We do.”

“There you go! That’s a problem here, there’s an energy crisis looming over this whole country, so if you have technology that could help us, why not give us the answers? Wouldn’t you say you have a moral obligation to intervene if it’s for the greater good?”

“It is highly unethical to interfere with the development of any civilization in such a way. When humans have invented space travel of their own accord, we may openly make contact, however until such a time—”

“We’ve been to the moon. That’s space travel. Did you know we’ve been to the moon?”

“I am aware,” Spock confirmed wearily.

“How do you know that? That was years after Amanda Grayson was abducted.”

“She was not abducted. She left Earth willingly and knowingly.”

“Don’t avoid the question, Spock. How do you know that?”

“You must not speak of this to anyone, Jim.”

“Spock. I have more than enough to expose you and your mission already. Just tell me,” Jim insisted, feeling irrationally defensive.

“The Vulcan High Council,” Spock began, and _whoa, okay,_ what a name for a government, “is officially monitoring the progress of several planets which we have identified as nearing the development of interstellar travel. Earth is among them.”

“For how long?”

Spock took a measured breath. “The Council has been monitoring this solar system remotely for quite some time. My father’s mission was the first to actually land on the planet’s surface.”

“He came here on purpose?”

“Yes, of course. As did I.”

“I thought you didn’t believe in interfering with primitive societies.”

“I did not describe humanity as primitive—”

“I think it was implied.”

“—and furthermore, we have taken great care not to interfere with your natural development on Earth,” Spock explained haughtily. He was sitting up straighter again now, looking down at Jim.

“That’s not true, Spock. The whole reason you’re here is that your father convinced a woman to leave her planet, and I don’t know what that is if not interference.”

“The fate of one person is not the fate of a civilization. Because she did not return, no sensitive information was ever released to humanity as a whole.”

“Yeah, because she didn’t return, Spock,” Jim said, feeling his hands tensing into fists in front of him, “this town has had a shadow hanging over it for almost thirty years. A family lost their daughter, they moved away because they couldn’t bear to stay in the house she disappeared from anymore. My mom lost her best friend, Spock.” He felt Spock drawing away from him and leaned in, lowered his voice. “Look, I’m not saying she shouldn’t have gone, I know that without her— I’m not saying I wish she hadn’t fallen in love and you hadn’t been born, I’m glad you were born, I’m glad that I’ve gotten to meet you, but you can’t say you haven’t interfered just because we haven’t gotten our hands on your interstellar communication technology.”

“Jim, it is not my decision to make,” Spock said helplessly. “I am not my father. I am not a member of the High Council. There are laws in place to guide our conduct in these situations.”

“So you think I’m right,” Jim ventured.

“I can understand your perspective on the issue,” Spock replied carefully. “However, I stand with the Council’s decision not to divulge any information that would alter the course of human history.”

“I’m not saying you have to, Spock, I just need you to see that you’re already altering the course of human history. Just by being here. People are different, you know, different than they would’ve been if Amanda had stayed on Earth. I’m different than I would’ve been if I’d never met you. And that spreads to everyone I’ll ever meet from now on, and everyone they’ll meet, and it never stops making a difference. Like that sludge your ship is leaking into the river. You can say your Vulcan friends are going to try to clean it up, but the river is already flowing. It’s always already flowing. There are already fish that have died. Some of that stuff has probably made its way into the ocean by now, and there’s no way you can get it back. I’m not saying it’s a bad thing that you’re here, or that Sarek came here, but it changes things. You can’t deny that.”

“No,” Spock said, “I cannot.”

“So don’t act like you’re separate from Earth. You’re here on Earth right now. And it doesn’t even matter what planet you’re on at some level. We’re here together. Vulcans and humans are living in the same world, right now, always, so you can’t pretend you can just watch us and not make a difference because it _all_ makes a difference, Spock. You can’t escape that. You’re not invisible. You’re a part of this world just like I am.”

A silent breathless moment passed. Jim could feel his blood rushing in his ears.

“Yes,” Spock said, staring at Jim with wide eyes.

In the eternity that followed, Spock took Jim’s trembling hands in his own. Jim couldn’t tear his eyes away from Spock’s face, but he felt as Spock brushed his thumb over the back of Jim’s hand, as he gradually increased the pressure until he was squeezing too hard and Jim could feel his own pulse pounding against the firm press of Spock’s hands.

He watched and waited for Spock to let him go, to pull away.

He waited to see embarrassment or apprehension make itself known on Spock’s face, and he waited for as long as he could stand in that uncertain moment but it didn’t happen. There was no question in Spock’s eyes.

So he squeezed back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> IT'S HAPPENING Y'ALL STAY TUNED FOR SOME REAL GAY SHIT NEXT TIME ON MALLEUS MALEFICARUM YOU'VE WAITED LONG ENOUGH FOLKS BUT IT'S ALMOST HERE!!!!


	9. Understanding and Body

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “It is asked whether devils, through the medium of witches, can change or incite the minds of men to inordinate love or hatred; and it is argued that, following the previous conclusions, they cannot do so. For there are three things in man: will, **understanding, and body**. Love and hatred are a matter of the will, which is rooted in the soul; therefore they cannot by any cunning be caused by the devil. The conclusion holds that He alone is able to enter into the soul, Who created it.”
> 
> - _Malleus Maleficarum_ of Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger, 1487

 

Once first contact had been made, Jim and Spock collapsed into each other like gravity pulling rocks into a ravine, like two magnets with opposite polarities, like atomic fusion. Their arms wrapped around each other, pulled each other close, chest pressed to chest, cheek pressed to cheek. Spock’s face was wet and when Jim kissed him he tasted salt.

The other thing that happened when Jim kissed him was that Spock pulled away wide-eyed and looked at Jim like he had twelve tongues.

“What are you doing?” Spock asked.

“I was… sorry, I was just. I thought you wanted to kiss me,” Jim explained slowly, not entirely sure what had happened. It had felt so—right.

“What is that?”

“Oh,” Jim said. _“Oh,”_ he said again. “Have you not—is there no—have you not seen anyone kissing since you got here?”

“I do not believe so.”

“Not even, um, on TV or anything?”

“What is TV?”

“Oh, whoa, okay. So, kissing is—well first of all, did you like it?”

“I am not certain.”

“It’s what people do—what humans do in order to express…” he faltered. To express what? Affection. Friendship. Gratitude. Desire. Happiness at seeing someone after not seeing them for too long. Longing. People kiss goodbye.

Spock held his gaze quizzically, waiting for an answer.

“Spock, I don’t know where to start. There are so many things… so many feelings, there are hundreds of types of kisses, and I don’t want to give you the wrong idea. It’s complicated. But for us it’s simple. I don’t know if it’s instinctual, or…it just makes sense.”

Jim saw the thoughts running behind Spock’s eyes, and then Spock said: “If you cannot explain with words, there is another way that I could understand. It is possible for vulcans to share thoughts with other beings. To look into the mind of another and be seen in return. So, if you would permit me to enter your mind…”

Spock was saying “I can assure you that no harm would come to you” at the same time that Jim was already asking “how do we do it?” and Spock’s hands were already outstretched towards him.

“My mind to your mind,” Spock said, pressing his fingertips to Jim’s temples on both sides, “my thoughts to your thoughts.”

Jim distantly remembered hearing those words before—this was how Spock had erased himself from Hikaru’s memory—and then his thoughts were muddled by a wave of some unfamiliar, confused sensation. He was still conscious of his physical circumstances, still watching Spock, who had closed his eyes and was breathing slowly, deliberately… but there was another layer on top of it now. The air between them seemed to ripple like a highway mirage. _Kissing,_ he thought without thinking, _kissing kissing kissing kiss kissed kissing_ and then he was a seventh grader again, gingerly kissing Marly Moreau on the lips for the first time, self-consciously drying sweaty palms on his jeans,

and then his ma was kissing him goodnight in the bedroom he used to share with Sammy,

and then it was four in the morning and Leila was kissing him thank you for bringing her cigarettes,

he was kissing Hikaru hello outside the flower shop after Hikaru’s first semester away at college,

he was opening the bathroom door at a party and closing it right up again because Chrissy had Roger pressed up against the wall of the shower and they were kissing hard,

he was sixteen on his bedroom floor kissing Bones as a joke and then he was kissing Bones _not_ as a joke,

and then it was last week when he’d tucked Bones into bed with a kiss on the forehead,

and then he was a child watching his mother drop the shears she’d been using to prune back the rose bushes to press her hands, gardening gloves and all, outstretched and palms-out against his father’s,

he was kissing Janice at prom, tasting the liquor on her breath and feeling the curve of her waist in his hands,

he was taking shelter from a dust storm behind a high red rock formation with his classmate Velekh, pressing both palms against Velekh’s and feeling the electricity of a poet’s mind sparkling at the edges of his awareness,

he was standing at the back of his distant cousin Sevek’s bonding ceremony watching the solemn, ceremonial press of Sevek’s left hand against T’Mal’s right,

he was watching Bones shakily lifting the veil off of Jocelyn’s face and pulling her in for a teary-eyed kiss,

and then Spock opened his eyes and Jim saw himself,

saw Spock,

saw himself and Spock overlaid like a double exposure photograph,

an imprint that burned straight through his mind to his pounding heart,

and then Spock lowered his hands, and Jim’s thoughts were his own again.

“That was cool,” he said without meaning to.

“Indeed,” Spock said.

They breathed in at the same time—Jim watched the slight flare of Spock’s nostrils, the rise of his chest, the movement of his jaw—and then Jim cracked a smile and the tension fell out of Spock’s shoulders.

_All right._

_Okay._

“So now that you know all about it,” Jim ventured, “what do you, um, think?”

“I think,” said Spock carefully, “that you were correct after all.”

“What?”

“In your assumption. You were correct. I did want you to kiss me.”

“Oh. Cool,” Jim said, wondering how red he looked.

And then he didn’t wonder anything because Spock’s mouth was on his again, this time with the knowledge gained from their meeting of minds – this time he kissed like a man who knew what he was doing – who knew what he wanted. Even as he sucked Spock’s bottom lip and rolled it between his teeth, Jim couldn’t keep himself from smiling. He felt himself swinging on a pendulum between heated, passionate focus and a champagne-bubble kind of exuberance, always trying to get as much of Spock as he absolutely could. He kept laughing and laughing at himself for laughing, and Spock kept kissing him anyways and he could hardly believe it, and when he met Spock’s eyes they were lit up with a warmth he’d never quite seen before.

They shifted on the stiff cushions to fit more closely together. Kissing and kissing and kissing him, Jim gently lowered Spock against one arm of the sofa. He felt Spock’s thigh lift to press up in between his own, and he understood the meaning of Spock’s fingers caressing the palm of his hand – a vulcan gesture, red and warm and inviting.

White hot starlight coiled up in Jim’s ribcage; a burning galaxy was orbiting, rotating, expanding in the cradle of his pelvis. He sent his hands out to explore, smoothing across the planes of Spock’s body, over the silk of his clothes – still cool and damp from the lake. He thrilled as he felt Spock run his fingers along Jim’s arms, as one hand traced down his chest to rest on his hip. He felt misgivings draining out of him. His heart was wide open and _Spock_ was pouring in. His right foot brushed against Spock’s toes and he felt tears well up, spilling from his closed eyes onto his cheeks. He lifted his hands to either side of Spock’s face and pressed their foreheads together, resting there, sharing breath; he felt Spock’s hands caressing his sides and he felt his own heart pounding pounding pounding low in his abdomen and –

He pulled away from Spock like he’d touched a hot stove.

“Is that… you? Are we…” Jim gestured vaguely to his own temple and then to Spock’s – _my mind to your mind, my thoughts to your thoughts._

A crease appeared between Spock’s brows. His chest rose and fell with a deliberate breath as he shifted to prop himself up on his elbows. “There should be no residual link between us once I have disengaged from the mind meld.”

“Is this,” Jim placed a hand over his belly, where he’d felt the insistent pulsing of a strange heart that was not his own, “where your heart is?”

“Yes,” Spock said, mirroring Jim’s gesture as though checking himself to make sure it was still there.

“I felt it,” Jim said. “I felt it like it was me. Like it was my heart.”

“Fascinating,” Spock breathed, after a long pause.

“It wasn’t bad," Jim assured him quickly. "I was just startled.”

“You are not… discomforted?”

“No, I liked it.”

“I am not sure that it would be wise to continue,” Spock said, pulling himself into a more upright position, minimizing but not eliminating their points of physical contact.

“Why not?” Jim asked impatiently, yearning to dive back into the golden aura that seemed now to bleed like body heat from Spock’s skin. Spock getting up and taking a step away from the couch felt like the Earth crumbling, felt like a chasm opening up under Jim’s feet. He watched as Spock began to pace, stirring up dust from the floorboards. He held his hands clasped in front of him, and pressed them to his lower lip in thought.

Then he spoke: “A melding of the minds is not a thing to be taken lightly when conducted between two vulcans. There are complications, often, even when both parties are aware of the mechanisms involved, even when both have been psychically trained for the thing from childhood. I should not have touched your mind, Jim, and I shall not touch it again. I apologize for my transgression. It was a… lapse of judgment, induced by a compromised emotional state. It is not safe for you.”

Jim considered the argument as best as he could in his flustered state. He shifted on the scratchy cushion, trying and failing to find a comfortable position to sit in. “Your mother did it,” he reminded Spock, “and she was okay, wasn’t she?”

“My parents were bonded only upon their return to Vulcan, under the supervision of an expert healer able to anticipate and assist with any psychic complications.”

“You really think they waited?” Jim asked incredulously.

Spock stopped in his tracks for a breath and then resumed his pacing. “I had not questioned the timeline with which I had been provided as a child, no. However…”

“However?”

“I suspect that what you propose is not unlikely.”

“So, it’ll be fine,” Jim said soothingly. “Come here.”

Spock did, but instead of joining Jim back on the couch he knelt beside it. He took both of Jim’s hands in his own. Jim felt himself lean towards him, felt the magnetism between them. He found himself picturing his own aura, trying to extend it, to press against the starlight glow of Spock’s consciousness. Instead, he felt a wall like a sheet of metal – it jolted his focus back into physical space and forced him to concentrate on Spock’s words.

“You must understand that a vulcan bond is serious, Jim,” Spock said gravely. “It is much more than an exchange of thoughts. When a vulcan is bonded, that bond resides within us always. It is not confined to the mind. It is a condition of being that persists, that determines the movements of our _katra_ until death.”

“Katra?”

“There is no equivalent in human philosophy as far as I am aware. The closest approximation would be your soul.”

“What if that’s what I want?” Jim found himself asking, unsure of the force that drove him to speak his desire – and unsure of where the desire had come from. All he was sure of is that he wanted to experience more of this melding of minds, more of Spock, more of Vulcan, more of the feeling of infinite closeness that came when Spock had welcomed him into his memories, had wandered through Jim’s thoughts in return.

Spock shook his head. “A katra is not meant to be stretched so far.”

Jim remembered being Spock, remembered hiding with Velekh behind a desert rock formation, the adolescent thrill of a first kiss. “I don’t understand. You’re not telling me that vulcans can’t have casual relationships, are you? Or not casual,” he corrected, “but what about finite? Do all vulcans mate for life?”

“The depth of the bond is dependent on many factors, one of which is the emotional control and mental discipline of the parties involved. It is possible, yes, to touch the mind of another and then to separate amicably. Even when the pair are very compatible, it is possible to part ways with their katra and leave nothing behind but memory. With discipline and a gentle touch, it is possible.”

“Then why not with me?”

Spock regarded him for a long moment. Jim felt Spock give his hands the barest squeeze.

“I do not have the mental discipline required,” Spock admitted. “Not in my current state and perhaps not at the best of times. As I am half human, I occasionally find my self-control to be insufficient. Your katra is exceedingly attractive to mine, and I suspect that I would be unable to make a clean severance. When I return to Vulcan, an imperfect separation would damage us both. I, of course, would have at my disposal any number of experts who would help me to heal my katra. For you, the damage may prove irreparable.”

“I understand,” Jim said. He broke Spock’s hold on his hands to place them on Spock’s shoulders. He turned over what Spock was telling him, registered the danger, and weighed it against the melting rock in his stomach that he could only categorize as _need._ “I accept the risks,” he said with confidence, being sure to deliver his verdict only once Spock was squarely meeting his eyes.

Spock’s expression wavered; Jim hoped he was tempted. His lips parted and there was still a trace of a bruise where Jim had punched him – not that long ago. Jesus, things were happening fast. Spock looked beautiful and Jim wanted to kiss him again but he didn’t get the chance. Spock sharply rose to his feet. He stood there like there was a rod nailed to his spine and held his hands behind his back.

“You do not comprehend the risks,” he said – venomously, Jim thought. “If you will excuse me, I would like to change into something dry. Goodbye, Jim.”

Jim’s jaw dropped and he watched, dazed, as Spock turned and strode imperiously out of the room, the still-wet hem of his robe sweeping behind him, dragging a path through the dust on the floor. He sunk into the couch, confused and tired. He thought that it must be three in the morning by now. He sifted through his thoughts, trying to make sense of what had come over him. He wasn’t surprised when his mind led him back to Amanda Grayson and the glimpse of a memory of her that he had seen in Spock’s thoughts. He closed his eyes and tried to layer the woman he’d seen on Vulcan – bent over the rose bushes, wearing sunglasses that looked like they came from Earth and a scarf around her hair and a long, sand-colored robe that stirred in the desert wind – over the woman he’d seen in photographs with his parents, with his brother. He tried to reconcile the smiling woman giving an alien kiss to her alien husband with the sight of his own mother poring over old photo albums late at night, sipping black coffee with tears on her face. Was the force that led him to kiss Spock that night the same mysterious gravity that had pulled Amanda all the way out to Vulcan?

Spock.

If Spock asked Jim to come with him now, would he go?

Had Sarek begged Amanda to join him in the stars, or had she invited herself?

He tried to remember more of what he had seen in the meld, tried to see the past through Spock’s eyes, but it was already falling away from him. For a long time he just thought of the way Spock had looked half underneath him on the couch, how his eyes had been so warm and how when they’d slipped closed his dark eyelashes cast shadows on his cheeks. A lapse of judgment, Spock had said, induced by a compromised emotional state. But that wasn’t all it was, was it? Underneath the confusion and grief there had to be something inside him that wanted Jim the way Jim wanted Spock.

_Katra._

A soul.

_My mind to your mind, my thoughts to your thoughts._

_My mind to your mind,_

_my thoughts to your thoughts._

Jim repeated the phrase over and over in his head, willing Spock to somehow hear him, to answer him, to slip comfortably into his brain and sleep there for the night.

 

***

 

He was woken by a knock at the door, sharp and deliberate.

“Spock?” He called out and received no answer. He tried again, but the house might as well have been empty. Dead air, silence, and then _knock knock knock!_ again at the door. He had no idea how long he had been asleep. Was it morning? He had to stop falling asleep in this old house without meaning to. Spock had to stop keeping him awake until he was exhausted.

_Knock knock knock!_

“Spock! Spock, this is not the time to make a point!”

Jim hovered in place, bouncing on the balls of his feet – what could he do? If this is the sheriff, if Bones called the police – he had to get Spock out of the house and _fast._

_Knock knock knock!_

He took a deep breath and stepped into the hallway and made a choice, hoping Spock would realize what was going on and meet him halfway.

_Knock!_

Every room he looked into turned up empty. 

_Knock!_

He searched the house for Spock’s hiding place and ended up with nothing.

_Knock!_

He couldn’t waste time turning the place inside out.

“Shit,” he said out loud when he finally reached the upstairs room where Spock slept – or meditated – and found it as empty as the others. He deflated, at a loss. It was only when the sound of blood rushing in his ears subsided that he could notice that at some point the knocking had stopped. Good. Maybe they’d moved on – they’d assumed the place was empty and they’d gone to look elsewhere – but no, Jim’s car was parked outside. He hadn’t even tried to hide it. He hadn’t thought anyone would come looking – not now, not this late at night – so he’d left it out there in the drive so whoever was knocking at the door knew damn well that someone was inside – so –

Behind him someone deliberately cleared their throat and then his stomach was down on the floorboards.

He turned around.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HI EVERYONE we're almost there i promise!! thanks for stickin with me <3


End file.
